Attack of the spoilers: are trailers giving away too much?

Don’t read this article if you would like to watch Deadpool & Wolverine or Alien: Romulus completely unsullied. Or Total Recall. Or Lord of the Rings. In fact, please go away now!

Trailers have been responsible for ruining a whole lot of movies. More than three decades ago, if you happened to be watching Paul Verhoeven’s classic sci-fi romp Total Recall but had already seen the promo material, you probably wouldn’t have been particularly shocked at the moment when memory-addled Arnold Schwarzenegger guns down his own wife and utters the immortal line: “Consider that a divorce.” Nor would you be surprised to note that Benny the Martian driver is really a mutant, that our hero was once much more than a lowly construction worker, or that Schwarzenegger does eventually release oxygen on to the surface of Mars in the film’s denouement.

That’s because all these moments are either given away completely or heavily hinted at in the trailer. And unfortunately things have only got worse since 1990. This week Marvel boss Kevin Feige was forced to advise fans to avoid watching advance publicity altogether for the studio’s films after the newly released Deadpool & Wolverine trailer gave away one of the meta-tastic movie’s many juicy cameos, in this instance the return of Dafne Keen’s X-23 from 2017’s Logan.