Do you ever wonder why it seems like every movie looks awesome after you see the trailer? Especially action movies? I mean, we really can’t trust trailers. Well, not most of them anyway.

Remember the trailer for the movie Sunshine? It was the sci-fi action movie about the team of scientists headed to reignite the sun which was on the verge of extinction. The movie was alright. I enjoyed it. But it was nowhere as tense as the trailer had led me to believe. Or how about the movie The Day After Tomorrow? The previous movie from the doomsday director of 2012 and Independence Day? While ID was pretty awesome, The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty big disappointment, though you’d never have guessed based on the trailer. Or to continue down the road, how about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer? That movie was terrible. But for some reason I still went to see it.

I could really keep listing movies. In fact, if you’ve caught the drift I’m going for, you can probably start naming movies yourself. It seems that regardless of what movie they make, they’ve got the art of a compelling movie trailer down to such a science that absolutely everything looks awesome.

You just can’t trust the trailer anymore. Some people I know wish they wouldn’t show trailers for anything. I used to disagree because watching the trailer was so much fun. But now, seeing no other alternative, I’m beginning to agree.

I have a hypothesis as to why this phenomenon is taking place: It’s all in the music.

Sometime around 1993-1995, someone in Hollywood figured out that epic sounding music was a sure fire way to sell movie tickets. If you watch the trailer for Terminator 2, you’ll notice that it fits pretty nicely in with modern trailers. The music is the most epic possible mash-up from the movie’s score. If you rewind into the the 80’s and watch the trailer for the first Terminator, it’s borderline silly by today’s standards.

But today, enter the music from such commercial artists such as Corner Stone Cues, X-Ray Dog or Immediate Music, and it all starts to make sense.

These groups (which I must say I’m quite a sucker for. I have them all in my iTunes library.) make music that is specifically intended to sound like soundtracks, although it’s not tied to any one particular movie. It’s like a store-brand soundtrack. Feels and sounds like the real thing, but it’s actually not. These groups, and groups like them, appear in virtually all trailers that don’t feature a song from a pop artist. And the songs are so awesome sounding that a string of action packed scenes placed on top of them automatically turn to visual gold.

While it makes the trailers pretty fun to watch, it almost seems like they’re not trying as hard to make really great—or at least really fun—movies, cause they know we’ll go see them anyway. Though, that might sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory

I imagine at this point it’d be pretty much impossible to go backwards to the way things used to be, which frankly, wasn’t so great either. (Really, I’m glad the guy with the weirdly deep, raspy voice isn’t working so much anymore)

I suppose for us movie-goers, we’ll simply have to become more scrutinizing in our taste. Which movies we choose to go and see will have to send a signal to Hollywood that a really awesome trailer isn’t enough to get the eleven bucks out of my pocket.

You’ll have to do better than that, Hollywood.