I'm sure Scott…Steve…Frogurt, whatever his name is, could speak to why trailer editors have to use themes from earlier movies in trailers, and what forces end up making the same five themes be used over and over.

Get 'im in here!

As for why trailers use existing movie scores…

There's no universal answer to why another movie's theme is used in marketing, but the safest would be that it illicits the right type of emotion to tell a story that quickly.

In most cases, humans respond to emotion first, logic/story/context/everything else second. The quickest way to emotion is music.

Movie score music is generally designed entirely around emotion first, while a chunk of standard music may have other priorities, like singing about having boats and money or breaking up with your ‘boo right before prom (aw yeah gurl).

Regardless, I'd say it's not freakishly SUPER common to hear movie scores in trailers. I mean, think of ALL the trailers out there each week (plus it’s way expensive to license a movie’s score). Everyone here is probably in the upper 1% of observational intelligence, especially for movies, so when “I Am Legend” uses a (modified, drummed up) cue from “The Fountain,” it sticks out to ya’ll. In reality, 99% of people don't remember specific scores, they just feel something when they watch a trailer then remember that feeling.

Most trailers use library music, specifically made to sound like movie scores, with perfect timing for segmented, evolving storytelling. IE the new Harry Potter trailer is library stuff from years ago.

I'm sure Scott…Steve…Frogurt, whatever his name is, could speak to why trailer editors have to use themes from earlier movies in trailers, and what forces end up making the same five themes be used over and over.

Get 'im in here!

There’s a gabillion people involved in any piece of marketing (director, producer, actor, trailer producers, studio heads, studio marketing folks and whatever else), and it’s never consistent as to who has the creative power. I think I got to live in every flavor of experience, from getting to do everything I wanted amongst great teammates thru being a puppet monkey slave for people I considered really unsmart.

I’ve never heard of any creative person long to copy what’s been done before. So when you hear the same cue in a million things, it’s probably more a business-over-creativity decision hammered down on them after much fighting (creativity requires innovation and new things are mathematically risky). I see, usually in fearful authorities, the logical business formula of "use the Requiem score, it was on Lord of the Rings and that made money therefore, we will make money.” In fact, in EVERYTHING in EVERY industry, it seems that the REALLY powerful authorities give creative freedom while middle management authorities are more fearful and copycatty.  Like they’re falling back on their mathematical reasoning before even making a decision.

I haven’t seen the Requiem For a Tower cue in anything since 2006. I think the new cliché is John Murphy’s Danny Boyle movie scores. 28 days later and Sunshine have been abused in Beowulf, Death sentence, Wolverine and as the score to KICK-ASS in the movie itself.

That night — that very night — I sat down to watch "House." I tuned in a few seconds early, just in time to catch the very tail end of the "next week on 'American Idol'" thing they did at the bottom of the hour. And wouldn't you goddamn know it, they used the exact same needledrop track I'd delivered that very day. And some thirty-odd million people heard it — assuming they weren't at the fridge or peeing or whatever at the time.

There are probably, what, twenty or thirty thousand tracks on APM, and probably one out of ten of them are in that same style. I just had the bad luck to pick the one that the Fremantle guy also chose.

Epic theme is epic, indeed.

I'm sure Scott…Steve…Frogurt, whatever his name is, could speak to why trailer editors have to use themes from earlier movies in trailers, and what forces end up making the same five themes be used over and over.

Get 'im in here!

Epic theme is epic, and already exists. It's a lot cheaper than either rolling out your soundtrack a year before the film comes out, or scoring the trailer separately.

Not to mention Marketing couldn't give less a damn about losers like me that find it a little tasteless.

- Branco

Get 'im in here!

I remember being appalled when the trailer for CASPER used "What's This?" from NIGHTMARE.

That new everyone-conspires-against-Matt-Damon-movie trailer uses the theme from Sunshine. Arrrghh.