The first trailer for The Fate of the Furious hit last Sunday and has got everybody people talking. Released as part of a major event in Times Square live-streamed on Facebook, the three minutes of footage didn't just show off the ridiculous stuntwork fans have come to expect, but also revealed that the franchise built on fast rides and furious devotion would split the central family unit in two - with Dominic Toretto going bad and forcing everyone else to hunt him down.
This franchise has already become one of Universal Pictures biggest series, its popularity only growing with each release, to the point that the last entry, Furious Seven, notched up $1.5 billion worldwide gross. All of that excitement and discussion points towards Fate of the Furious being one of the most anticipated upcoming movies going into 2017.
The numbers definitely back that, with Deadline reporting that The Fate of the Furious trailer has become the most-watched trailer release of all time, with over 139 million views in the first 24 hours. That number is calculated from various sources, including the event's live stream, its spot on Sunday Night Football and standard YouTube views.
There's been a lot of record-breaking trailers recently. It was just last month Beauty and the Beast's "Trailer 2" broke the record (which was previously held by Star Wars: The Force Awakens' "Official Trailer"), but it couldn't even hold onto it for a full month before Fate of the Furious knocked it off. And the recent likes of Transformers: The Last Knight, Fifty Shades Darker and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 all came close too. Of course, with a full trailer for Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk due any day now and a teaser for Star Wars Episode VIII plausibly arriving within the next few months, Fate of the Furious may not hold onto the record for long, either.
The key reason why we're seeing so many highly-viewed trailers, and why The Fate of the Furious won out, is because trailer releases are becoming bigger and bigger events. "Trailer teasers" are the norm, with fifteen seconds of footage shown a few days in advance to get audiences aware of a drop - and the exact time of release highly publicized to get fans refreshing YouTube channels. There's also more ways to watch trailers than ever before - Facebook and Twitter most prominently - that make accessing a new one so much easier (and missing it impossible). Indeed, The Fate of the Furious' trailer has only 6 million views on the official YouTube channel at the time of writing; meaning most of its record-breaking total came from other channels or outside of the video service.
This expansion of trailer culture, to not only obsess over new snippets of footage but celebrate marketing reach, may be pretty exasperating for those who dislike spoiler-filled teases. However, the numbers alone show that plenty of people do turn out for them - and the biggest takeaway from this news is that The Fate of the Furious will be massive at the box office.
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Source: Deadline
