By: Nick Gambino
YouTube has decided to take away ads and demonetize some of the biggest fake movie trailer channels on the platform, including Royal Trailer and Screen Culture. The era of the fake movie trailer might finally be coming to an end.
You might be asking yourself what exactly is a fake movie trailer. Your first thought might be that it’s one of those funny parody trailers like Honest Trailers. No, it’s not that. Then you might be wondering if it’s one of those fan-made trailers that cuts together footage from other films. Yeah, it’s kind of like that but really it’s something else. And that’s the problem.
Fake movie trailers have become an industry unto themselves. What started as a few movie fans dabbling in editing to create amateur trailers for fake movies or fake sequels, has morphed into large teams making a ton of money by churning out endless trailers for upcoming or rumored movies. And they’re almost all rotten with AI.
While these types of trailers started out using real clips from other movies, the advent of generative AI has changed the nature of the videos. They now employ AI content that represents what characters might look like. This comes in handy in big superhero trailers.
The problem is these trailers tend to fool a lot of people and the channels that pump them out do little to make it clear they aren’t real. Sure, there’s the word “concept” in the title and mention of it not being real down in the description. But if the owners of these channels really wanted you to know these were fake they would just call it a fake or fan-made trailer. But it seems they would rather you think you’re clicking on something real.
The fact that they are making a lot of money by rearranging other artists’ work just doesn’t sit right with me. Add in the fact that the studios did little to curtail it because, it turns out, they were sharing in the revenue from these channels, and it makes it a whole lot worse. After a Deadline article called out this weird new industry, YouTube started cracking down.
With no real ability to make money off these fake movie trailers, we can expect to see a lot less going forward. Now if Meta can do something about the endless parade of AI images in every other post on my Facebook feed, that would be great.
