When Arnold Schwarzenegger growled, "I'll be back," just before barreling through the police station lobby in 1984's The Terminator, no one imagined that the menacing android once sent to destroy the future might return seven years later on a mission to protect it. But in late 1990, as Terminator fans grabbed their popcorn and nestled comfortably into their seats for a good Christmastime action movie, they found themselves watching gape-mouthed when confronted with a T2 teaser preview that featured clips of robot arms drilling and soldering together a new Terminator skeleton amidst a spray of sparks and steam — a clawlike metal arm tenses its hydraulic bicep, two dead robot eyes suddenly dilate to life, a gleaming steel press molds skin onto an indestructible frame. Moments later, the camera swings up to reveal Schwarzenegger's fully flexed naked body to rest on his clenched jaw and the stern, inhuman look on his face. The camera hovers a moment before his eyes flash open to reveal a fiendish red glow burning beneath.

Sleek and narration-free, the preview heralding Schwarzenegger's return as the Terminator closed with the metallic slam of the T2 logo on screen and a glorious recontextualization of the familiar "I'll be back" line, long a catch phrase among Terminator fans. Indeed, the Terminator would be back to reward the fans of the original, fans who had memorized and could perform every line of Schwarzeneggerian dialogue. But what exactly do audiences look for in the sequels to their favorite films, and how have they responded to different types of sequel trailers in the past? The sequel itself has little bearing on the issue here. Rather, what specifically matters are the audience's expectations. Theatrical previews, which offer fans their first sample of how their most eagerly anticipated sequels will look and feel, often play the earliest and most prominent role in shaping fans' expectations for the film.

In the case of the trailers for Terminator 2, audiences responded with nearly overwhelming enthusiasm. From the look of the new footage, all shot specially for the teaser trailer, the sequel seemed poised to deliver all the big-budget cool fans could expect. Don LaFontaine, who recorded the narration for a second trailer that reached theaters nearer the film's release date, remembers seeing the preview with audiences at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome. That later preview featured actual footage from the film, including a select number of jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art computer-generated images that had already been rendered for the final version. According to LaFontaine, audiences went wild at the sight of their favorite tough guy facing off against impressive new advances in the digital-effects realm. Clearly, audiences relished their first taste of T2, using the trailer's high-octane montage of sleek action scenes to convince themselves just how much further the sequel intended to push the thrill of their beloved original. When Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened over the July 4 weekend in 1991, it drew $53 million at the box office, eventually outperforming the original by more than five times in its total domestic gross.

Where most trailers focus on generating awareness for an upcoming film, the previews — especially the early teaser trailers — sent out to announce sequels to popular films should accomplish two additional tasks. Most importantly, sequel trailers must show skeptical fans how the new film intends to recapture everything they love about the original. But even more challenging, sequel previews should also show how the new film will further develop that established prototype to deliver a dependable emotional reaction. In a sense, studios peddle the best clips from their upcoming films like a free trial hit for some new drug, expecting audiences to come salivating back for more. Not that the studios actually have to try very hard to attract attention to their most coveted projects. Fans will act in surprising and curious ways to get their first fix, as some of the following examples should help to illustrate, with audiences even going out of their way to actively hunt down some previews.

The phenomenon hardly limits itself to sequel previews, though audience reaction tends to be most extreme when fans already have some vested interest in a film before it opens. There's a reason that Hollywood spends so much money adapting popular comic books, television shows, video games, and novels to the big screen. In fact, it's the same mentality that green-lights sequels: Movies that extend an existing trend come with a built-in audience. Previews for Terminator 2, for instance, don't just appeal to fans of the original. They also reach out to both James Cameron aficionados and Arnold Schwarzenegger buffs, not to mention fans of the genre. Sequel previews merely provoke the most extreme reactions from audiences, though the same philosophy of promising audiences that an unfamiliar movie will deliver familiar pleasures while also extending the enjoyment in some exciting new way governs the basic pitch of most trailers.

In psychology, behaviorist theory supports the important role advertising plays in understanding how audiences select the movies they choose to watch. The theory proves particularly useful in conjunction with trailers — as opposed to at-home viewing decisions, where audiences leisurely flip through channels, sampling content before coming to rest on a potentially interesting program — since trailers strive to motivate audiences to actually get out and spend money to see a new movie within its first few weeks of release. Behaviorism's uses and gratifications model assumes active, goal-directed audiences who identify what benefits they expect a movie to deliver and then make decisions according to whichever options they expect to satisfy their needs. When it comes to sequels for popular films or movies, viewers already have some understanding of the pleasure they associate with the original film. Fans of The Blair Witch Project, for instance, may appreciate the movie's unique pseudo-verité approach. The fact that previews for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 undermined and actively parodied audiences' gullibility over the original could likely explain why, when the trailer played in theaters, skeptical fans responded by breaking out in fits of laughter. On the Web, fans can congregate at Harry Knowles's Ain't It Cool News Web site to read advance scoops and share their own impressions about upcoming movies. As one visitor so eloquently phrased his impression, "the trailer makes it look like a garbage dump of a movie" [view full posting].

In the case of any sequel, viewers decide whether watching the new film is likely to disappoint them or whether it might reproduce and possibly even heighten the aspects that initially impressed them about the film. The uses and gratifications model therefore explains both why audiences show up for sequels (because they expect to experience more of whatever aspects enchanted them about the original) and why they respond so dramatically to previews for movie sequels. With cult films, audiences have frequently attached some sort of emotional significance to the original. Though enthusiastic fans may hear rumors about a sequel years before it even begins production through fan Web sites, trade journals, or specialized 'zines, they depend on trailers for hints as to whether the sequel can really deliver those same gratifications. The expectations fans set for an upcoming movie are limited only by their imaginations. They are free to conjure up whatever elaborate hopes or fears they have for the film. But when trailers come along, fans finally get the chance to test their expectations against actual footage from the film, judging the preview as they will eventually see the film itself: projected on-screen and accompanied by reverberating sound, the sole focus of their attention as they sit in the dark embrace of a movie theater.

Audiences assume that the trailer will showcase samples of the movie's best moments, carefully selected so as not to give away the entire thrill. They recognize the trailer for what it is — a delicious tease, another form of foreplay — and actively seek it out. The entire process involves a certain degree of masochism, as does any form of advertising that strives to generate demand for a product before it is readily available. Whatever immediate satisfaction the trailer might provide is tempered by the excruciating span of time audiences must wait before the film opens. And yet, fans revel in the anticipation they know will follow their having seen the trailer. Sequel trailers present a further, potentially masochistic danger for fans. In cases where audiences have already formed some expectations for a film, the possibility that the sequel might damage their conception and enjoyment of the original introduces another thrill to the fan practice of scoping new trailers. As suggested earlier, previews for Blair Witch 2 indicated that the sequel would openly ridicule fans for believing the Blair Witch mythology, which kept away audiences whose attraction to the original sparked from ambiguities about its credibility. Where the original had snowballed to success at the box office, the sequel met with a harsh reception — pulling in a comparatively mawkish $13.2 million in its first weekend and disappearing from 80% of its screens within two weeks of its release. Such devastating results indicate that even though the film had a built-in audience (fans of the original still turned out for the sequel), many had gotten wind that Blair Witch 2 didn't follow in the original's footsteps, likely drawing their conclusions from their impressions of the preview.

Such hypotheses give us some idea of what audiences look for in trailers and what they expect from the finished films, but they don't necessarily answer the question of how real fans have responded to trailers advertising sequels, remakes, or movies that develop some other already popular source material (TV show knockoffs, comic-book adaptations, etc.). However, keep in mind that even the average moviegoer actively evaluates trailers, making predictions as to whether or not the benefits of a new movie might match or even exceed the benefits he or she associates with another movie (either the original in the case of a sequel, remake, or adaptation, or a similar movie in the case of genre or star-driven pictures that appeal to that same sense of familiarity).

When George Lucas originally released Star Wars in 1977, he ambitiously dubbed the film "Episode 4: A New Hope." The film itself was remarkably self-contained, with little demand for either prologue or extension. However, after the movie's outstandingly popular success, Lucas opted to develop the story forward, following Star Wars with two equally successful sequels. More than 20 years later, Lucas finally made good on his implicit promise to go back and film the three Star Wars prequels, a decision that stirred Star Wars fans around the world into a frenzied state of excited anticipation. Lucas publicly announced that he had delayed filming the prequels until computer animation could catch up with his vision for the introductory episodes, which encouraged fans impressed by the renovations he made before re-releasing the original trilogy to expect similar digital-effects improvements in the new films. Few movies ever enjoy the same extreme degree of fan behavior that trailers for the long-awaited Star Wars — Episode I: The Phantom Menace generated within the first week of their release.

In late November 1998, more than six months before the film's release, rabid Star Wars fans flocked to screenings of movies they had little or no interest in seeing just to catch a glimpse of the film's preview. Earlier that month, Twentieth Century Fox, responsible for distributing The Phantom Menace, granted selected theaters in 26 states permission to screen the teaser trailer the Tuesday before they would release it nationwide. At the Mann Village theater in Los Angeles, more than 2,000 viewers showed up for the Tuesday-night advance screenings, where the lure of getting a sneak peek at the preview sparked an 85 percent increase in ticket sales for The Siege, the movie it accompanied. The next day, Lucasfilm posted a Quicktime version of the preview to its starwars.com Web site, where the file was downloaded a record one million times during the first 24 hours it was available online. Thursday night, television news programs Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood broadcast the trailer in its entirety. Finally, that Friday, audiences swamped screenings of Meet Joe Black after learning that Fox had attached the Phantom Menace teaser to prints of the 178-minute Brad Pitt weepie.

A visitor to the Ain't It Cool News site happened to have seen the teaser preview in the same audience as actor Jake Lloyd, who plays young Anakin Skywalker in the film. "I thought it was really funny that a theater of science fiction nerds and Star Wars geeks would sit ... through a 3 hour Brad Pitt movie to catch [a] 2.20 minute trailer!" he mocked. A surprising number of those "Star Wars geeks" actually chose not to sit through the movie, paying full ticket price only to leave after seeing the Phantom Menace teaser. Saul Rubin, reporting the phenomenon for The Los Angeles Times, compared the response to "kids tearing into a cereal box for the prize and then tossing the flakes. No one felt cheated." ¹

Bombarded by hoax trailers and unconfirmed reports on the Web, Star Wars fans turned to the theatrical preview as their first "official" glimpse of the film, wildly trying to imagine what each image might signify — a visibly younger Yoda, a wiry and primitive-looking C3PO, an impressive new red-and-black-faced villain. The trailer afforded audiences the luxury of experiencing clips from the movie in an actual movie theater, but even more importantly, it conveyed a long-overdue air of legitimacy to the Star Wars hype. "Evidence" now existed where rumors had previously dominated, and fans could finally witness actual excerpts from the continuation they had so anxiously awaited. Like the freshly-released teaser posters, which depicted a young Anakin casting a shadow in the shape of Darth Vader, the preview reasserted the new film's connection to the existing Star Wars trilogy. "It doesn't matter if the trailer met my expectations (it did!), or if Yoda looks weird, or if Jake Lloyd can't act (I think he'll surprise all of us)... what matters is that the feeling is still there. What I saw there not only looked like a star wars movie, it felt like one, and that's all I care about," reported one Mexico-based Star Wars fan to an Ain't It Cool News bulletin board after viewing the trailer from his computer (view full posting].