Why Steven Spielberg spent $600,000 on the trailer for ‘The Lost World’
Marketing the sequel to the highest-grossing movie the world had ever seen is about as straightforward as it gets, but much like Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond in the opener, Steven Spielberg spared no expense when it came to The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Not only was it more expensive to produce, but the film’s various partners – including Burger King, Timberland, Tropicana, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz – were part of a $250million blitz orchestrated by studio Universal to ensure that nobody would be able to turn around without bumping into something reminding potential customers that a brand new Jurassic Park movie was right around the corner.
Unfortunately, The Lost World was vastly inferior to its game-changing predecessor in every way and earned hundreds of millions of dollars less at the box office, but nobody knew that at the time. The first full-length trailer debuted in the coveted Super Bowl halftime slot in January 1997, but a month beforehand, Spielberg had gone all-out for the sake of a teaser.
Not even the full trailer, though, just a hint of what was to come. Teaming up with sound system creators Digital Theatre Systems, the filmmaker installed a bespoke strobe lighting system that could mimic rain and thunder in 42 cinemas around the United States, where a sextet of strobes were synchronised to the footage to create an immersive experience like no other.
“It’s one thing to create lightning on the screen, but when you also have it coming from the rear and sides, it creates a whole environment,” the company’s president and chief operating officer, Bill Neighbors, said to Variety. It was unsurprisingly pricey, too, with each site necessitating an installation that ran up a tab of $14,000. Multiply that by 42, and it’s $588,000.
They weren’t even there for The Lost World‘s premiere in May 1997, either, so it was quite literally just an experiment to drum up additional buzz for the teaser, which came before the proper trailer, which was used to hype the impending arrival of the film itself.
It sounds unnecessary, but considering Digital Theatre Systems was part-owned by both Universal and Spielberg’s own Amblin Entertainment company, it was an expense that did sort of make sense in terms of the parties involved and the word-of-mouth they were trying to accomplish.
A progenitor of sorts to current 4DX technology, then, the strobe lights gave viewers the impression they were right in the thick of the dinosaur action, which may have had the unintentional knock-on effect of making the movie they’d bought a ticket to see in the first place less exciting by default. Spielberg gets what Spielberg wants, of course, and in this case, it was half a million dollars of strobing for the sake of what was basically a sizzle reel.
