Der Guardian berichtet über Filmtrailer: warum manche Regisseure keine Trailer mögen, warum sie manchmal sogar das Ende verraten und warum meistens die Musik aus dem Trailer nicht im Film vorkommt, den er bewirbt: To cut a long story short.

But by far the oddest practices in the world of trailers concern the music that accompanies them. Film scores tend to be completed so late in the production process that most trailer editors can’t use the correct music even if they want to; normally, however, they don’t. Deploying the music from a successful older film to advertise a new one must be about as close to subliminal advertising as it’s legally possible to get: the makers of the trailers for the recent movie Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey, knew the movie they wanted viewers to be reminded of – Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands – and so they bought the rights to its score.

This would appear to be the way to make your millions as a composer for the cinema: Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for the 1995 film Crimson Tide, is estimated to have made at least 50 times more from its subsequent exploitation – in trailers for Armageddon, The Devil’s Own, Independence Day, Mulholland Falls and others – than from its original use.

But the current record, according to the website Soundtrack.net, is held by the composer Randy Edelman. You may not have seen Come See the Paradise, Alan Parker’s 1991 film about the wartime romance of an Irish-American man and a Japanese-American woman. But the score proved so useful for trailer-makers that it has been used in the advertising for no fewer than 24 films, including Clear and Present Danger, Cry, The Beloved Country, Devil in a Blue Dress, Donnie Brasco, A Few Good Men, The Joy Luck Club, Patriot Games, Philadelphia, The Sum of All Fears, Swing Kids and Thirteen Days. Edelman, a former pop songwriter, is now a wealthy man.

(Danke an Konstantin für den Hinweis.)