Reading Film Trailers as Serial Texts: Narrative and Dramaturgic Seriality Within and Across the Trailers for Greta Gerwig's Barbie

Reinterpreting key concepts from seriality studies within the context of film trailer analysis, this article offers a novel approach to the study of film trailers. Since contemporary film marketing often releases several trailers in the promotion of a film, it is imperative to acknowledge and examine the commonly ignored serial nature of these trailers. As a close reading of three trailers released for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) demonstrates, each trailer constitutes a successful standalone piece of narrative media, however, additional meanings and interpretations emerge from their seriality. Each trailer crafts a distinct and deliberate version of the film’s plot depending on the specific phase of the promotional campaign during which they were released, resulting in an ambivalent overarching narrative about the film. Techniques of serial narration (e.g., recursion, cliffhangers, and plot twists) used in this meta-narrative about the film ensure viewer engagement and participation. As this article concludes, the trailers decenter the narrative singularity of the film, creating a paratextual network in which the film’s version of the plot becomes merely one node alongside other retellings created prior to the release of the film by the individual trailers and the serialized dramaturgy across them. The plot of the film then reveals itself to be an amalgamation of different serialized texts synthesized by viewers.