In the modern era, film fans see more film and TV trailers in a week than 80s audiences would've seen in a year, and that has an impact. Most movie trailers today bounce off of the collective memory without impact, some inspire massive cultural excitement, but a few stick around as a monument to failure.
Rob Zombie, beloved rock star and intensely controversial film director, hasn't put out a film in three years, since the conclusion of his unique Firefly trilogy. He's back in a big way with a project he's been trying to make happen for decades, though it looks like he threw it together over a weekend.
On July 13th, 2022, the first full trailer for The Munsters dropped online. No one has seen the film and there's no way to judge its quality, but the trailer is easily one of the worst yet released by a major studio. It opens on a playful rundown of Zombies' filmography, to poke fun at the fact that a director known for shock horror is taking on PG kids' content. A generic font and a bad voiceover wave in the trailer with the feeling of a 2009 YouTube short film. Once the events get going, the colors are garish and unpleasant. Most of the sets are grossly ruined by cheap-looking neon lights. The makeup looks decent enough, but the lighting lends it a commercial-esque vibe. Interestingly, these issues are intentional, but the commercial is rife with technical issues.
There are genuine technical issues that go beyond subjective taste. The trailer suffers from some horrific sound issues, some effects contain technical failures and other sounds seem to be missing. The opening gag is delivered with what appears to be effects that come free with Windows Movie Maker. The editing is jarring and unpleasant, often leaving the viewer disoriented with its weird choices. The production overall probably could've been better served by a team of college students or a mildly successful YouTube channel's on-staff editor. It reminds the viewer of nothing so much as the first trailer for Tom Cruise's The Mummy. That film's first appearance featured an accidentally unfinished trailer that lacked some key audio tracks. That trailer was removed and reuploaded and most fans who captured it to make fun of it got a takedown notice from Universal. This one, on the other hand, carries the studio's tacit approval.
Marketing a film is hard, but most of the problems with this trailer are amateur hour issues that would get a freshman film school student publicly shamed. This is Netflix. This is Universal Studios. This is an established brand that could be conceivably turned into something marketable. Perhaps most notably, this is Rob Zombie. Zombie is a lot of things, but he's rarely lazy. His work feels scraped from the strange inner workings of his mind, cobbled together from people he met on the road and scary stories from the carnival he grew up in. He never fully understood the "one for me, one for them" model, so he found the audience who would enjoy the ones for him. Every production is a passion project for Zombie, including his previous works of adaptation. Rob Zombie isn't the guy studios call to phone in a lame cash-in on a barely relevant name. Especially not a barely relevant name like The Munsters.
Fans of his work already know that his most popular song is his 1998 metal hit "Dragula", and they probably also know that the title and central element is The Munsters' car. Rob Zombie loves The Munsters. He has since he was a kid, and he's been trying to get the rights to make movies about it since the early 2000s. He finally gets the license to do what he wants with the property that inspired him as a child, the one that gave its name to his biggest hit, and this is what he turns in? This kind of lazy, thoughtless, messy, dumped on Netflix trash doesn't belong anywhere near terms like passion project. The only possible explanations are a complete lack of effort from the marketing arm of the studio or that Zombie was forced to edit it himself on an outdated laptop.
There is worthwhile stuff buried in the first trailer for The Munsters, but it'll be a long road to forgetting the terrible execution. Elements of its presentation are sincere attempts to preserve the lovably off-kilter elements of the original show, but technical difficulties and visibly cheap production make it tough to watch. Hopefully, Rob Zombie got to makeThe Munsters film that he's been trying to make for two decades and this trailer is just a lazy series of mistakes. Fans will have to wait and see whether it's a hidden gem or an accurately appraised mess.