Smells Like ‘10s Spirit: How That Iconic Trailer Saved ‘The Social Network’

“Smells Like ’10s Spirit” takes a look at the decade in movies through the lens of success stories only made possible by unique trends that emerged. This series explores ten films – one from each year of the 2010s – and a single social, economic or cultural factor that can explain why it made an impact or lingers in the collective memory. Each piece examines a single film that tells the larger story of the tectonic forces reshaping the entertainment landscape as we know it. In this edition: David Fincher’s The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin.

“I think a lot of people have certain feelings about it because it’s about Facebook, but it’s not really about Facebook – at all,” Rooney Mara’s talking head informs viewers at the outset of the feature-length behind the scenes documentary about the making of The Social Network. She’s followed shortly thereafter by Armie Hammer, who declares, “It’s not a movie about a website. Yes, that is one of the elements of it, but it’s about #5 or #6 on the list of what this movie’s actually about.”

Nearly a decade out from the release of The Social Network, it’s difficult to fathom a time in which people possessed any qualms about the film’s existence or doubted its brilliance. When critics begin unveiling their best of the 2010s lists, it will all but certainly rank as one of the consensus favorites. Earlier this year, Jordan Peele tweeted, “Feels like ‘The Social Network’ is due for a sequel,” summarizing the way many of us feel every time the malfeasances of Facebook begin trending once again. (Even Aaron Sorkin himself couldn’t resist penning an open letter to Zuckerberg in the New York Times in November 2019, ending with the quippy kicker “I’d have had the Winklevoss twins invent Facebook.”) And yet, the aforementioned documentary bears the title How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?, harkening back to the pre-release period when the general moviegoing public rejected the idea of The Social Network altogether.

Pulling old clips to dunk on people making bad predictions can be mean-spirited and lazy, so I’ll keep this brief. Given the nearly unanimous esteem for the film now, however, it’s necessary to show just how pervasive the doubt was in the development and production stage of The Social Network.

“Okay, let’s make this quick because I’m logging off, going outside and sitting quietly under a tree for the rest of eternity,” wrote /Film when the film was announced in August 2008. “Writer Aaron Sorkin […] announced he’s penning Facebook: The Movie (our title).” The Playlist made this dire prediction at the time: “Good luck Sorky, because you aren’t going to have an audience.” Adding Oscar-nominated director David Fincher did little to assuage concerns, either. When he boarded the project in July 2009, Film Junk summed up the prevailing mood of the movie commentariat, writing, “this definitely seems like a project that is well below Fincher’s talents. To be honest, I’m not even sure why he would be interested in such a thing.” The AV Club was also blunt: “Seems like a bad idea to me, but then again, I’m not Hollyweird director.”

How did we get from that moment, a time when writer Brian Truitt declared “I would rather see the proposed Monopoly movie than a Facebook movie,” to The Social Network landing the #1 spot at the box office in its opening weekend on its way to eight Oscar nominations? The path to success was far from guaranteed, and the film could have easily veered onto the road taken by a later Sorkin project (that once had Fincher attached) about a tech billionaire with bad people skills, 2015’s Steve Jobs. One key element served as an inflection point in the larger narrative about the film in popular culture, aligning expectations with the quality of the project itself and saving the studio from a costly bomb. That moment? The release of the film’s second trailer in July 2010. (The film’s first teaser trailer came out in June 2010, a few weeks before, and didn’t make much of a splash.)

The trailer occupies a strange middle ground between art and advertisement. The best ones combine a little bit of both. At its core, the preview of a coming attraction must serve the purpose of generating interest in the film with the end goal of driving ticket sales and views. But to achieve this mission, trailer editors often employ tactics borrowed from the toolbox of the artist. As University of Maryland professor Michel Wedel observes, “They [trailers] are more like a sample of the product than a testimonial to its better qualities.” Since the product takes the same form as the vehicle to sell it – scenes spliced together with sound – conventions for trailers solidified around encapsulating the viewing experience in microcosm.

As The Social Network geared up for release, the form was in a bit of flux for a number of factors. First, 2010 was just two years removed from the death of iconic voice-over artist Don LaFontaine, most famous for coining (and trademarking!) the phrase “In a world…” His booming bass narration set the standard for decades beginning in the 1980s. If studios could not afford him, they certainly emulated his authoritative salesmanship. “We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to,” LaFontaine once said of his style. “That’s very easily done by saying, ‘In a world where … violence rules.’ […] You very rapidly set the scene.” Trailers did not risk misinterpretation, nakedly declaring their themes and settings in concise yet flowery language. But by the time of LaFontaine’s passing in 2008, his style was rapidly devolving into a cliché – a process which he abetted by appearing in a 2006 Geico spoof of his own work.

Second, access to video-equipped smartphones and high-speed Internet was expanding rapidly but still far from omnipresent in American homes. According to a 2010 Nielsen report, only 25% of households had a smartphone, and broadband Internet adoption was still at just 63.5%. These numbers would only continue to grow, but the effects of giving people access to video on their computers and in their pockets had yet to exert themselves on the form of the trailer. It would still be five years before the phrase “pivot to video” would wreak havoc on the media industry, signaling a permanent shift towards rich media that would shrink the attention span of users to a mere 8.25 seconds. Notice how trailers on YouTube now begin with a few seconds sampled from the rest of the video? That’s because they can’t risk losing viewers to the MPAA green-screen or a company logo.

The time was ripe for innovation, especially when Nielsen’s reporting showed that 76% of moviegoers were still inclined to watch trailers in a theater. Many of the discerning audiences who turned out in droves for the mid-July opening of Christopher Nolan’s Inception witnessed nothing short of the rebirth of the trailer for the 2010s. With the lights of the theater dimmed, the work of Mark Woollen reframed the discussion around The Social Network by answering a difficult question: how do you sell a movie and create emotional stakes for the stuff of everyday life, however heightened it might become in Sorkinese?

The second trailer for The Social Network is probably most memorable for the fact that 50 seconds, a full third of its duration, does not feature a lick of footage from the film. It fades in from darkness as soft piano keys tickle a few notes, pixelating to reveal the very thing most moviegoers left their home to avoid: a Facebook news feed. This creative decision arose less from a marketing imperative and more out of necessity – according to Wired, Fincher only gave Mark Woollen 20 minutes of footage from the film, so he had his team pull screenshots from their own Facebook pages.

A girls’ choir begins singing – it’s a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” – and adding a weighty feeling to the mundane celebration, connection and isolation that occurs at any given moment on the platform. The music, editing and, eventually, dramatic pushes in give real weight to the site’s everyday activity, putting to rest any notion that Facebook cannot make for compelling drama.

Then, a final pixilation occurs, and we’re looking at a picture of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg as he sports a piercing yet hollow glance. The cover of “Creep” continues, providing a sonic through-line from the Facebook snippets to scenes of the film itself, only now it is accompanied by lines from Sorkin’s rapid-fire screenplay. In 90 seconds, the trailer packs in 85 cuts and 17 separate lines of dialogue exchanges, the velocity and intensity of which quickly build to a crescendo. No voiceover is necessary to lay out the stakes as quick bursts of character dialogue provide a rough sketch of the plot and conflict.

This trailer for The Social Network hits a sweet spot of doling out enough visual and auditory information for audiences to come to a determination about the film’s story without spoiling the film altogether. A YouGov survey published in early 2013 revealed that nearly half of all moviegoers believed that trailers gave away the best scenes in a film, a problem avoided here by offering glimpses of those scenes without letting any of them play out in full. This dynamic is important for any distributor to manage because if a trailer does its job too well, what reason is there for a viewer to come back and pay for the movie?

Trailers for David Fincher’s films frequently employ this technique of fragmentation, and it works so well in large part because it’s difficult to sell audiences on adult dramas. Unlike what researchers have found for genres like horror, action and sci-fi, these films do not necessarily result in strong activations in the amygdala region of the brain, the crucial portion for processing emotion. The trailer for The Social Network excels not due to a “neurocinematic” property but rather to a design philosophy coined by Raymond Loewy known as MAYA – Most Advanced Yet Accessible.

This theory, as explained by Derek Thompson in his 2017 book Hit Makers, holds that innovations succeed when they balance the familiar with the futuristic. Anything that pushes or expands a form must also bow to some element of convention that already exists. The Social Network‘s trailer sells the notion that Facebook can be turned into a movie by featuring the platform front and center but also directly connecting it to the real human emotions in the film’s content. The Scala and Kolacny Brothers cover of “Creep,” so prominent throughout the trailer, works as well as it does for a similar reason. By taking a recognizable song but couching it in an elevated choral style, the trailer reaffirms a comfortable pleasure while also bestowing an imprimatur of prestige upon it. Woollen’s work communicates to the audience that a movie about Facebook is just like any other movie – except probably better.

To say anything delivers overnight results is a bit of a stretch, but the trailer for The Social Network almost singlehandedly changed the tune of the film commentariat. “I’ll admit, when I first heard that a movie about the creation of Facebook was in the works, I was pretty skeptical,” wrote Entertainment Weekly blogger Josh Rottenberg. “Now — having just watched the full trailer for the movie […] I’m totally sold.” Over at NPR, Linda Holmes was won over but still skeptical: “Don’t get me wrong — based on this trailer, I’m eager to see the movie, and my guess is that it will be good. But then I find myself stepping back from it and wondering how many people want to watch an entire movie about Facebook, and I’m just … not sure.” As we now know, there were plenty of people – The Social Network went on to gross nearly $100 million in the U.S. and has maintained substantial legs thanks to heavy cable play and Mark Zuckerberg’s inability to keep his creation out of the headlines.

Any doubt that the film’s trailer played a significant part in powering this success ought to be dispelled by remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Screen Crush has documented at least 55 cases of sad cover songs in trailers over three separate lists since 2010. With the possible exception of the loud “BRAHM!” noise from the Inception trailer, no other trailer comes close to exerting the influence of The Social Network‘s in the popular imagination. Dressing up footage of a movie with a melancholy cover has now become lazy shorthand to convey higher esteem on a project that audiences may not initially consider worthy of it. This trend reached its nadir in 2015 with a trailer for San Andreas that cloyingly employed a Sia cover of “California Dreamin'” over footage of a cataclysmic earthquake that would provide the setting for Dwayne Johnson’s heroism.

As The Social Network‘s innovation fades into a cliché, it’s worth noting that this style of trailer would likely be unable to turn around a movie’s reputation so drastically in 2019. The gentleness with which the trailer onboards viewers into what it’s doing feels incongruous to a media environment that prioritizes grabbing attention with the flashiest material right out of the gate. Studios like 20th Century Fox are working with Google’s machine learning capabilities to use “temporal sequencing” in order to predict customer behavior and have even partnered with IBM’s Watson to create a trailer for Morgan using AI. As audiences have greater control over the promotional video content they view, Professor Michel Wedel notes that the unit of measurement to capture interest is no longer the trailer – it’s down to the few second snippet that people see on Netflix, which might not even play with sound on.

We might very well be reaching a place where trailers become a science for blockbuster titles but remain an art for scrappy movies that need to break through to fight for the table scraps leftover. But for now, let’s take comfort in the fact that a trailer made sure that one of the decade’s best films actually got before the audience it deserved.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream The Social Network