Everything framing the film itself — trailers, posters, behind-the-scenes, interviews, reviews. Massively shapes how audiences approach the print before frame one.
Before your film has even run for a second, the audience has already developed expectations – through trailers, film posters, social media snippets, interviews with the cast. This entire surrounding envelope significantly determines how the copy is accessed. You rarely notice this on set; in editing and marketing, it becomes a game-changer.
The framing material – theorists call this peritexts – functions as a visual and narrative pre-expectation. A thriller trailer with jump scares influences the viewer's brain so much that they still get scared by scenes that are completely subtle in the finished film. A making-of with heartbreaking anecdotes about the lead actress colors the emotional interpretation of her performance. A critical interview with the director about his work sharpens attention to certain symbols – or directs it entirely in the wrong direction. You can have shot the best scene; if the pre-release coverage frames it completely incorrectly, the audience will see it with a distorted view.
In practice, this means: trailers and post-campaigns do not influence the film itself, but its reception massively. A horror film advertised as an arthouse drama will be watched differently than the same film with blood-and-shock marketing. Interviews can reveal spoilers or set expectations that then remain unfulfilled. And credits – they are part of it too – have a lingering effect: if the name of a star director appears only after the last scene, it has a different psychological effect than if it prominently features at the beginning.
As a DoP, this interests you because you need to understand how your visual design is pre- or post-positioned by the peritextual. A dark, grainy black-and-white poster predisposes viewers differently than a colorful marketing cut with optimized saturation. And vice versa: if the marketers heavily distort your look for the pre-announcement, the actual film will be a disappointment. This is not a theoretical game – it decides about success and failure at the box office and in the reviews.