Studios Now Budget Marketing Over Story, Making Trailers the Real Product

Other Mommy, Jessica Chastain's demonic-double horror film, arrived this month with 30 million YouTube views on its trailer, meme-ready screenshots. The distinctive studio armor of a "kept-from-critics" release — yet the film itself has none of the trailer's clarity or dread.

This gap is not new. Understanding why it's becoming industry standard requires looking backward to 2013, when James Wan's The Conjuring reset how horror got marketed.

Wan understood something crucial about compressed storytelling. He could place a single image — a rocking chair moving on its own, a pale woman standing in the dark. And hold it long enough that the viewer's mind did the narrative work. The studio marketed those 15 seconds relentlessly. Audiences showed up expecting the feature to deliver that same concentrated dread over two hours, which it never did.

The Conjuring and its sequels made enormous money anyway. By the time viewers felt the letdown, the opening weekend was already locked. The formula worked so well it became systematic. What Other Mommy reveals is that studios have now inverted the equation. They budget for marketing that exceeds narrative architecture. The trailer becomes the product.

They budget for marketing that exceeds narrative architecture.

The "kept-from-critics" strategy isn't primarily about protecting bad work from early damage. It's insurance against audiences recognizing, before opening weekend, that the thing they've been sold for attention is not the thing that exists. This matters beyond film. Any creator selling compressed, high-impact work. A portfolio piece, a pitch, a 60-second video. Has already internalized this structure, learning to make the moment work and hoping the full arc can follow. The discipline now is recognizing whether you're building something that sustains or something that sells. These have become different skills.