 by Jacob Jones Well, ladies and gentlemen, that time has finally come – the time to reflect on the year’s end and celebrate all the cinematic gifts 2024 had to offer, and of course this means the beginning of the 2024 end-of-year Top 10 lists. While it hasn’t been the strongest movie year overall, there were plenty of films deserving of celebration (which we will get to in due time), and plenty of film marketing worthy of that very same praise. To that end, it’s time to unveil the first of these lists, and begin the countdown all the way to the Top 10 Best Movies of 2024. Whether the films on this list ultimately lived up to their advertising or not is another conversation altogether, but the participants in this particular countdown demonstrated once more that the craft of making advertisements in the first place is an art form in itself. Without further ado, here are our picks for the Top 10 Movie Trailers of 2024! 10. Superman | Official Teaser Trailer The production of James Gunn’s Superman (formerly titled Superman: Legacy) has been extensively covered by just about every entertainment news outlet on the planet, sometimes daily. Perhaps the most anticipated film of this year relative to box office expectations and tone-setting for an entirely new brand of DC films under Gunn’s new leadership, the pressure has never been more on to make a film which honors the titular character’s core faculties while also delivering on something entirely new. To that end, the trailer doesn’t give much of the film’s plot away at all; in fact, the title for the movie itself isn’t even included with all the footage we’re shown, so understood is the film’s subject and remix of John Williams’ iconic theme (perhaps the greatest singular piece of music the maestro has ever made). What we are shown are a lot of soon-to-be iconic images in brief flashes – a seemingly buffoon-ish Clark Kent towering over the other citizenry of Metropolis, a no-nonsense Lois Lane kissing both Superman and Clark, a never-balder Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Krypto the Superdog coming to rescue his owner after what’s clearly been a rough fight – as well as an establishment of tone as Superman puts himself between danger and a little girl walking the streets, and a young boy in an unknown warzone holds up a flag, willing the Man of Steel to come and save them. Given the gravity of its subject, the trailer’s placement may seem a bit low on this list, but with such limited footage and only vague glimpses at things we haven’t seen before, there’s not a whole lot higher a mere teaser for a film still seven months from release can fly. 9. Sinners | Official Trailer Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan are a match made in movie heaven, much like Jordan Peele and Daniel Kaluuya, but as those latter two don’t have a film releasing until 2026 (at least on Peele’s part), the old south vampire thriller Sinners from the former team will have to do. The trailer – again merely a teaser for a film still months from release – went against many expectations viewers had for the film, chiefly by revealing the story’s setting and the fact that Jordan himself would be playing twin brothers in a dual performance alongside some terrific IMAX photography and a never-more-popular Hailee Steinfeld. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss MBJ’s canon arms mowing down whatever’s on the other end of those final bullets in theaters. 8. Trap | Official Trailer As with the previous two entries on this list, the most exciting thing the first trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap revealed was the premise of the film: a man named Cooper attends a concert with his daughter in tow, only to be told that all the extra security present at the venue – and the concert itself – is an elaborate set-up to catch a notorious serial killer known only as The Butcher. The kicker? Cooper is that very same Butcher. Unfortunately, the film itself – while underrated in its own right as a meta commentary on involving one’s own family in your work – failed to live up to the expectations of its stellar marketing run, but that first trailer nonetheless was a bolt of lightning for exciting new thrillers in an otherwise rather underwhelming summer blockbuster season. 7. Saturday Night – Official Trailer (HD) Speaking of bolts of lightning, while I enjoyed Saturday Night a good bit, there’s no question that its first trailer captured the manic energy of producing never-before-attempted live television glory better than even the movie did. That may seem like harsher criticism than it’s meant to, but without a trailer as fast-paced as this, full of young stars and mounting complications in every second, and driven by a literal ticking clock as the first episode of SNL struggles to make it to air, the film would have been a total flop at the box office. The film is good, to be sure, but nothing in it can match the heights this trailer took us to on the silver screen. You can read my full review of the film here. 6. Juror #2 | Official Trailer Clint Eastwood is 94 years old and still churning out some of the most thrilling premises – and trailers – any fan of movies could ever ask for. The trailer begins with Nicholas Hoult, the protagonist of this story, recounting to a lawyer what happened a year before when he may have accidentally hit a deer during a rainy drive home from a local bar; the intrigue of the film is that he’s also one of the selected jurors in a murder trial, and may have hit the victim instead of an animal. That’s not only a great premise for moral conflict in a movie, it’s a built-in thriller ripe for theaters, which is what makes it so perplexing and frankly maddening that WB CEO David Zaslav opted to only put the film in 50 theaters before shoving onto the Max streaming service at the tail end of the year. Still, the trailer was an impressive one, and made us all wonder whether Eastwood had one more Oscar juggernaut in him before he left us for good. 5. Megalopolis – Teaser Trailer A project over 20 years in the making, Megalopolis is a fascinating misfire of a film for Francis Ford Coppola, but for a long time, people wondered if it was ever coming out at all. Produced by Coppola using his own money from decades of sales and doing other projects to pay debts accrued during previous productions, the ludicrously expensive film lacked distribution despite its stacked cast and well-regarded director. So when the teaser trailer for the film finally dropped on Coppola’s own YouTube channel, it felt like an old master declaring his return to once more to the silver screen, a triumphant comeback for one of the best to ever do it. It’s still one of my favorite trailers released in 2024, and if the film had lived up to all the glories it promised within those first minutes of footage we received, we might have been talking about one of the best films not only of the year, but of the decade to date. 4. Conclave – Official Trailer [HD] Coming off of All Quiet on the Western Front’s enormous Oscar success, Edward Berger had something to prove with his next feature. Was his success the result of his own talents or the product of adapting one of the great novels of all time for the modern age? And what was he going to do next? It could have been another grand-scale epic with large ideas and larger-than-life action sequences, but instead Berger turned his eye toward adapting an airport thriller like a lengthy toxic workplace episode, and Conclave is all the better for it. The trailer for the film lays it all out: Edward Berger directing, Ralph Fiennes starring, score by Volker Bertelmann, and a premise based on electoral politics during an election year – the timing could not have been more appropriate. That the film largely lives up to the expectations set by its initial unveiling is a miracle worthy of praise in itself. You can read my full review of the film here. 3. Monkey Man | Official Trailer In the early days of the year – January specifically – the first trailer for Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, dropped like a lit stick of dynamite and quickly became one of the favorite trailers of cinephiles the world over. The bone-crunching action, cut to the sounds of Panjabi MC and Jay-Z’s “Beware of the Boys,” echoed through the theater speakers and every. single. cut. counted for something. The trailer sent a jolt of anticipatory energy into the stratosphere of moviegoers’ worlds, and with Dev Patel in the lead part, having produced the film so hard that stories about him apparently breaking his hand during a take began to surface around the same time the trailer released, there was no way Monkey Man was going to be anything less than something special. The film itself doesn’t quite live up to the trailer’s revelatory editing, but there’s still some incredible work within it, including a dining room fight that still ranks among my favorite action sequences this year. You can read my full review of the film here. 2. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story | Official Trailer To understand why Superman means so much even to people who didn’t grow up reading comics, such as myself, one has to understand Christopher Reeve’s embodiment of the character. Able to play both the shy and book-ish Clark Kent and the strong, towering personality of Superman simply by changing his voice and posture within a single scene, there was no one – and there’s likely to be no one ever again – who so thoroughly understood the dichotomy of the Super and the Man. What’s underscored by this film’s marketing is that Reeve in particular understood both his own iconography and how important it was for him to project his humanity to the world so that they might all feel super in their own ways, particularly with his work in paraplegic spaces following his tragic accident. The trailer for Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, despite some text cutaways that seemed a tad generic for a documentary about a well-known celebrity, is a triumph of editing and musical composition as the Kryptonian and Superman themes comes together to celebrate the life of the original man of steel, at least in movie history. There’s a reason it inspired grown men to cry in reacting to it, and it's because of how much people still value Christopher Reeve as a person and Superman as an icon of hope. You can read my full review of the film here. 1. 28 Years Later – Official Trailer (HD) I have something of a confession to make: I’ve never seen Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (rectifying that soon), nor have I seen 28 Weeks Later, its purportedly less successful and less beloved sequel, though the latter does appear to have its defenders. That said, if anything was going to get me to watch them as soon as they were available and I found myself with a few hours to spare, it’s the stellar first trailer to the franchise’s third entry, 28 Years Later, which is once more directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. While the initial moments of the trailer harken back to the series’ previous entries, the bulk of it is made of a cacophony of stunning images, set against the sounds of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” a poem published in 1903, which is being recited in a 1915 recording by Taylor Holmes. The recitation of the poem has an incredibly eerie effect on the viewer, almost forcing them to reckon with the terror about to unfold, and if the accompanying imagery is anything to go by, this new trilogy starter could well be one of the most haunting moviegoing experiences of 2025. And those are my picks for the Top 10 Movie Trailers of 2024! What were some of your favorite trailers this year? Anything I missed in the Honorable Mentions? Let me know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! - The Friendly Film Fan Honorable Mentions:
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