Getting Viewers to the Screen 2
Getting Viewers to the Screen: The Role of Sexual and Violent Images in Movie
Previews on Viewers’ Anticipated Perceptions and Enjoyment of Motion Pictures
The importance of media entertainment is evidenced in a variety of ways,
including the sheer amount of leisure time devoted to this activity, and the seemingly
endless array of media entertainment choices available to viewers (Zillmann, 2000).
Television programs, movies, video games, and the Internet all provide consumers with a
multitude of entertaining diversions, with competition for viewers’ attention arguably at
an all-time high. As such, efforts to affect these choices and to lure viewers to one form
of entertainment over another are particularly important, and presumably profitably, in
our entertainment-saturated culture. In terms of motion picture entertainment specifically,
the focus of this paper, the importance of media promotion is evidenced in terms of the
sheer amount of money spent on movie marketing, with approximately $1.6 million per
film devoted to marketing previews in 2001 (MPAA Research Development, 2002).
Similarly, movie promotion has become more ubiquitous in recent years, with movie
trailers now appearing in a diversity of locations, including in shopping malls, on ATM
machines, and on the Internet (Liedtke, 2000; MPAA Research Development, 2002).
With the importance of movie promotion resulting in what is an arguable “glut”
of movie trailers, what types of portrayals contained within trailers will succeed in
making movies appealing to viewers, or at least making them more appealing than other
movies that are also promoted? At first glance, the answer to this question may seem
obvious: Movie trailers contain content that reflects what one can expect to encounter
when viewing the actual motion picture. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that
Convention