I went and saw The Wild Robot over the weekend without knowing a single thing about it and ended up enjoying the movie a lot. I truly think part of that was not knowing anything about the movie except seeing the poster, knowing the title, seeing the rating, and knowing it was for kids and was animated (which was evident by the poster and rating). Beyond that, I was clueless. I didn’t even know if the robot would talk or not. The story unfolding out for me entirely was nice to experience.
I won’t ruin any parts of the movie for anyone who may be in my position too, but if you’re into animated kids movies with a hint of sci-fi, you’ll probably like this movie.
I only became aware of this movie as I was checking on times for Alien Romulus and saw this instead. My girlfriend’s son is obsessed with robots so I knew this was likely a movie he’d like to see.
The only place where I’m bombarded with ads anymore is on YouTube on my phone and TV where my adblockers don’t work. So I had never had this movie advertised to me in the usual way others have been.
With the way YouTube ads work, I usually get bombarded with the same repetitive trailers that make the movie obnoxious to me after seeing the same trailer for the 100th time. And it seems that the theme over the past few decades is to spoil parts of the movie in the trailer. Like one of the trailers for Dogman that was shown before The Wild Robot in the theaters tells us how Dogman becomes Dogman… Being for kids, I’m sure it doesn’t matter and it’s not the focal point of the movie, but like, I would have preferred to find that out when watching the movie, not beforehand.
Speaking of Alien Romulus, I’m a fan of the Alien movies but the trailer before Deadpool 3 showed soooo many of the crew’s deaths that it really spoiled the movie. Part of my thrill of the Alien movies for me is finding out who survives from the crew of each movie. But not this one… which is why I still haven’t seen it. I just felt really unmotivated to go see it when it released last month and I didn’t see it this weekend because I’m okay with waiting for it to release for home and maybe I’ll forget what I saw in the trailer by then.
But The Wild Robot was exciting and very enjoyable and I think a lot of that had to do with the fact I knew very little.
I know that a lot of people share the same sentiment about trailers spoiling the movie, but my unpopular opinion is that I don’t want to see anything about it beforehand, in most cases. Give me a poster, title, rating, and I can figure out the rest as to whether I’d like to watch it or not.
This is not to say that movies should never have a trailer of any kind. No, far from it. Just don’t advertise the trailer so repetitively and even more than that, make the trailer available for watching on demand. If I am interested but still on the fence because your poster or title didn’t convey enough, then I can go searching for the trailer on a site like YouTube and watch it for myself.