Why did movie trailers stop using modern needle drops?

Dim-wits online throwing themselves into a racist frenzy over Gladiator II’s trailer “daring” to feature Denzel Washington dominated much of the publicity in the aftermath of that trailer’s premiere. However, another aspect of this piece of marketing stuck around in my brain long after it debuted. Gladiator II’s trailer was set to the song “No Church in the Wild." Initially, that choice was innocuous enough. After all, American period piece movies have a long tradition of marketing themselves with anachronistic needle drops. The first Gladiator even did this with one of its trailers set to a Kid Rock tune! However, what fascinated me about this song choice was that this song's been around a while. This Jay-Z and Kayne West track first appeared on the 2011 album Watch the Throne. More importantly, it previously dominated the trailer for another Denzel Washington action movie, Safe House.

How strange to employ a tune that appeared in a previous Denzel Washington movie trailer and came out over a decade ago. Then again, Gladiator II’s marketing needle drop choice isn’t that peculiar in the current Hollywood landscape. Modern trailers have largely abandoned utilizing tunes made after 2015, a very sharp contrast to decades of motion picture marketing normalcy.

For the longest time, movie trailers naturally used fresh radio hits to draw people to the theater. Nostalgic soundtracks and needle drops were still around, of course. That Forest Gump soundtrack didn’t become a household fixture by relying on early 90s bands like Nirvana! However, unless your movie inhabited a past era, its trailer would inevitably involve some distinctly modern tune. Just look at all the late 90s trailers set to Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life”. In the early 2000s, meanwhile, every trailer was seemingly legally required to feature Smash Mouth or Blink-182 songs. Maybe that was some secret part of the PATRIOT Act?

As late as the 2010s, movie studio marketing teams embraced fresh new tracks for trailers. The hope here, as it had been in decades past, was that people would associate an artist and/or song they liked with an upcoming movie. Connecting those elements together could give viewers a fondness for a forthcoming motion picture. Plus, Hollywood largely made movies geared towards the under-30 crowd. They didn’t want to hear “old man” music, they wanted today’s latest hits! That’s why The Wolf of Wall Street’s teaser trailer employed Kayne West’s “Black Skinhead” a day after that track dropped. Countless teen-skewing movies from the early 2010s, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Host, reveled in Imagine Dragon needle drops.

A last hurrah for this phenomenon came in summer 2015. This was when the David Guetta and Nicki Minaj (plus two more artists) song "Hey Mama" showed up in practically every comedy movie trailer. If you went to a theater that summer, chances are you'd get the American Ultra and Sisters trailers back-to-back and find that tune inescapable. "Hey Mama" even came back the following summer for the Bad Moms trailer! There was just no other song choice to depict wacky white people engaging in raucous antics you might not expect them to dabble in.

By the end of the 2010s, though, a palpable shift had occurred. The hottest songs of any genre from these final years of the decade were absent from movie marketing materials. 2019 doggie movies A Dog's Way Home and A Dog's Journey used 2013's "Wake Me Up" and "Gone, Gone, Gone" in their respective trailers. The Jumanji: The Next Level trailer used Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train". Meanwhile, The Secret Life of Pets 2 inexplicably based its trailer around the Killers track "All These Things That I've Done".

2020s movie trailers have only exacerbated this trend. Some exceptions exist, of course. 2023 horror title M3gan employed Taylor Swift's 2019 ditty "It's Nice to Have a Friend" in its first trailer. Madame Web, meanwhile, set its only trailer to Billie Eilish's "Bury a Friend". Such trailers are now anamolies, not the rule. More typically, 2023 blockbusters like The Flash would set their trailers to mangled versions of Pink Floyd's "Time".

2024 feature Monkey Man promoted its action mayhem with the Jay-Z remix of the Panjabi MC tune "Beware of the Boys (Mundian to Bach Ke)". That remix not only premiered in 2003, it previously dominated The Dictator's marketing campaign back in 2012! Even the younger-skewing Challengers set its propulsive trailer to Rihanna's 2011 song "S&M". New Chappell Roan, Beyonce, and Sabrina Carpenter hits dominating the airwaves and TikTok are nowhere in our newest movie trailers. What a contrast to "Black Skinhead" inhabiting The Wolf of Wall Street's trailer the moment it dropped!

So what’s going on here? Why is, save for the occasional Taylor Swift song, 2015 the cut-off for pop songs in modern movie trailers? Part of it is the decline of the big-screen comedy. This genre was always the one using hit radio tunes from bands like Maroon 5 or Train in its trailers. Once theatrical Kevin James and Kevin Hart movies vanished, so too did pop songs in major theatrical movie trailers. Meanwhile, the success of Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 inspired Hollywood's commitment to distinctive “retro” needle drops. If trailers for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania were going use familiar tunes, it'll be something from the 70s, not a recent Post Malone hit.

Another factor at play could be escapism. This is all speculation, but the 2015 cut-off point for most movie trailer needle drops suggests songs made after Donald Trump’s election could be off-limits to motion picture marketing. Anything reminding people of that POTUS or the COVID-19 pandemic might register as antithetical to Hollywood's emphasis on “escapism”. There have already been endless think pieces on Hollywood refusing to make movies acknowledging the existence of COVID-19. This song-oriented marketing trend could be another symptom of the film industry wanting to avoid “thorny” subjects.

Then there's Hollywood's increased catering towards older moviegoers in the last decade. Theatrical motion pictures starring teenagers (which would need marketing heavy on musicians young people know) have vanished from the movie scene. Summer blockbusters once squarely aimed at children now bend over backward to give 40+-year-old men nostalgic rushes. Endless remakes of the past, particularly in the form of cursed live-action retreads of Disney cartoons, fill movie theaters. Hollywood has shifted away from its 30+ year focus on the 15-29-year-old crowd. So too have music tastes in mainstream movie marketing also changed.

Trailers don’t dare utilize artists like 100 gecs and Chappell Roan that folks under 25 adore. Going that route could alienate older folks looking for reminders that the original four Ghostbusters exist. This is why we keep getting movie trailers and actual film sequences set to “Born to Be Wild” or “Spirit in the Sky” for the umpteenth time. The most egregious example of this “snake eating its own tail” approach is in the Reagan trailer. The second half of this promo is set to a somber “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” cover. What a momentous choice clearly done to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Dracula Untold trailer. That price of marketing also featured a grim redo of that tune (courtesy of Lorde). What's old is new again.

Sure, some modern movie trailers for Trap, Barbie, or Twisters utilize distinctly current tunes. However, these exceptions are largely employing ditties created specifically for the movie. These needle drops exist to promote an original soundtrack, not tie into the modern musical zeitgeist. Primarily, though, the movie marketing landscape appears terrified of ever using songs made after 2015. One can speculate endlessly on why that is. However, the continued erasure of more modern music (or at least tunes that “belong” to Gen-Z/Gen Alpha) from movie trailer needle drops sends a clear signal to the under-20 crowd. That signal simply reads "theatrical cinema isn’t for you". That needs to change. Embrace new songs and, by proxy, a new generation of moviegoers, Hollywood! And not just because I want a Gladiator II trailer set to “Hollywood Baby”!