Even setting aside complaints about its racial politics or the quality of its jokes, the trailer for the new Ghostbusters is bad. As a video editor, I can tell you that the first 30 seconds of any clip are the most important in grabbing your audience’s attention. But how does that trailer use this crucial time? Aerial shots of New York mixed with white on black text with a slow piano rendition of the hit Ghostbusters theme. And for the next full minute, the whole plot unfolds, leaving very little to the imagination. Then we see what seems like a complete scene straight from the film. It feels like a trailer cut for a drama, with tiny fleeting bits of comedy peppered in out of context.
But fortunately, a film director based in LA, Bevan Bell, has taken it upon himself to recut the trailer in order to salvage the franchise’s legacy. “I knew [the trailer] could be better,” Bevan said. “I added the original soundtrack, some original movie sound effects… and [cut] it into something I might enjoy watching.” He made the trailer much faster, cutting the redundancies, repetitious lines, and flat out-of-context humor, but leaving in all the ghosts and plasma that we expect from a Ghostbusters film.
