I will argue that Hollywood family films are designed to transcend normative barriers of age, gender, race, culture and even taste they target the widest possible audiences to maximise commercial returns, trying to please as many people, and offend as few, as possible. How have ‘family films’ become so globally dominant? One answer is that Hollywood’s international power facilitates the global proliferation of its products, but this explanation, in isolation, is insufficient. Since the 1970s, Hollywood family films have been the most lucrative screen entertainments in the world, and despite their relativelyunexplored status in academic film criticism and history, I will argue that the format is centrally important in understanding mainstream Hollywood cinema. "This thesis is the first in-depth, historical study of Hollywood’s relationship with the ‘family audience’ and ‘family film’. When situated into the contexts of their industrial and spectatorial temporality, announcement trailers prove to be rich sites for examining blockbusters, not only as intertextual commodities which spread far and wide, but also as inter-temporal commodities in which specific temporal structures are shaped, shared, revised, and felt. Building on Jonathan Gray’s concept of ‘speculative consumption’, wherein audiences ‘create an idea of what pleasures any one text will provide’, this article refers to this textual construction and affective sensation as speculative nostalgia, asserting that it is constitutive of today’s blockbuster culture. Moreover, their specific reveal-conceal structure also encourages fans to scan the text for clues (to look inward) while making connections to previous texts (to look outward). As teasers-for-the-teaser-trailer, these ephemeral texts invite audiences to look forward to an upcoming film while also calling on them to look back to a previous cinematic encounter. This article examines the blockbuster ‘announcement’ trailer.
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