What is the longest gap between a movie’s trailer and its release?
When asked to ponder the longest gap between a movie’s trailer and the film’s eventual release, one obvious candidate emerges. After all, in 1997, cinemagoers eager to watch Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones battle the scum of the universe in the Hollywood blockbuster Men in Black were first treated to a short teaser trailer for a film a full year away from release. That trailer reportedly cost $600,000 and didn’t feature a lick of footage from the final film. Instead, a quick shot of a giant lizard foot crushing a T-Rex skeleton was enough to whet people’s appetites for Roland Emmerich’s lamentable 1998 Godzilla adaptation.
However, it’s still highly unusual for a movie trailer to be released a year before its debut in cinemas, so Godzilla didn’t start any kind of trend. Shockingly, though, one year isn’t even close to the longest gap between a trailer and a movie’s release, so the mystery hasn’t been solved yet. Allow us to explain.
In Hollywood, the average length of time between a trailer dropping and the movie’s release is around six months. According to Hollywood stats expert Stephen Follows, 80 per cent of films release trailers within that timeframe, while a scant 4.5 per cent take the Godzilla option of a year-long runway. The film that holds the Guinness World Record for the longest gap between its trailer and its debut released its first teaser, a mind-boggling nine years and two days before the movie crawled into cinemas.
Naturally, there is no way any marketing department would plan for their trailer to drop nearly a decade before the movie. That would be insane. Still, when audiences flooded into cinemas to enjoy Jim Carrey’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas on December 9th, 2000, they were greeted by a brief teaser for an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. That movie wouldn’t arrive until December 11th, 2009. Even more intriguingly, this early trailer would seemingly vanish off the face of the Earth.
Why did it take so long?
The mysterious story of the lost Where the Wild Things Are trailer goes back to the early 1980s when Disney bought the rights to Sendak’s children’s classic. John Lasseter was tasked with overseeing the project, and the future Pixar supremo planned to use a combination of traditional animation and CGI techniques. However, when Tron bombed at the box office, the project was scrapped. It would later reemerge at Universal in 1999, though, when Gore Verbinski of The Lone Ranger infamy signed on to direct.
When the teaser finally appeared before The Grinch, it quickly became something of an urban legend. It’s not available to view on the internet, reducing eagle-eyed fans to take the word of Reddit users about what it entailed. Indeed, according to an anonymous IMDB source, a Redditor named u/CountrySuperstar claimed the teaser amounted to little more than a logo, a roar, and a soon-to-be bitterly ironic “Coming Soon” message.
Over the next several years, Verbinski flew the coop and was replaced by animator Eric Goldberg, who was then jettisoned for Being John Malkovich’s Spike Jonze in 2003. Sendak publicly supported Jonze, saying he was “young, interesting and had a spark that none of the others had,” so when Universal decided not to proceed with the movie, Jonze stayed attached as it migrated to Warner Brothers.
The development difficulties that Where the Wild Things Are subsequently experienced at Warner are a whole different story, but suffice it to say that its path to release in 2009 was still fraught with pitfalls, even with a genius like Jonze at the helm. By hook or crook, though, he saw it through—and nabbed a World Record in the process.
