andrewducker

D'oh! I forgot to include "Check the score on the IMDB."

Can you edit a poll after it's been voted on? I know you can change your vote. And I'll note that you and I are the only ones to vote on it, so you could just delete it.

For me, trailers (if I see them) might make me go and see a film I wasn't intending to see, but mostly I only download trailers of films I already know I want to see.

The primary deciding factor is "Is this a film I really want to see, absent the trailer or peoples reviews?" Basically most comic book based movies fall under that heading, and occasional other stuff.

Friends reviews can persuade me to see something if it's all-encompassingly positive, or persuade me not to see something if the results are all or mostly negative (I've not bothered going to see PotC 4 based on that.)

And by the time I finished writing that, several more people have voted. Ah well…

Of course this only covers movies I'm on the fence about. When Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and/or the final Harry Potter movie or please, please, please a new Saw movie comes out I'll go see it no matter what the trailer of specific reviews say.

And as a male with a heterosexual girlfriend it goes without saying that anytime a film with Clooney or Matt Damon comes out I'm going to end up seeing it no matter what any critics say, because honestly Rome Girl would probably be ready, willing and able to watch those films with the sound off.

That said, I've reached a point where anything directed by Stephen Speilberg is something I'm not going to see even if critics say it's the second coming of Citizen Kane.

I'd like to say the same about George Lucas but I know myself well enough to know that if Episode 7 is ever made I'll line up to be disappointed.

I'll also line up for anything that has Bruce Willis playing a cop no matter what the trailer or critics say. Same deal if they ever make Zombie Strippers 2.

The other things which I do include looking on IMDb or Wikipedia for details like who's in it, who produced / directed it, what else they've done that I migth have heard of / liked / disliked, etc.

Oh, absolutely. I kind of took "The people who made it made other things I liked" for granted. Possibly I shouldn't have.

I am a big geek. If the movie includes some geeky thing of which I am alread fond--comic books, pirates, shiny special effects--that is usually enough to convince me I want to see it regardless of what anyone else thinks. After all, if it sucks, I still get the fun of complaining about it. Win!

I'll generally watch anything if it has spaceships or zombies in it.

Pandorum came close to having both, and it was bad.

T'is true, I have wasted a lot of my life watching terrible movies.

I try to avoid detailed reviews before seeing a movie that I'm interested in. Anything more than a star rating and a one-sentence opinion can give too much away, IMHO.

Sometime I'll read them afterwards.

Same here.

Sometimes I become aware of movies I might want to see via cinema trailers, but I never deliberately download a trailer of a film I'm considering seeing, because they're usually too spoily. Reviews even more so. I scroll past them on LJ until I've seen the film, and then go back and read them afterwards.

Yeah, it's a bit paradoxical - you need the trailer or other publicity to tell you what the movie is, then you need to shun it for the same reason.

Being Not A Movie Person, the last new movie I saw was E.T. (the week of its first release), so this really doesn't apply to me. (The fact that they now have to be captioned (in English) for me to even begin to understand them makes this situation unlikely to change.) And yeah, this applies also to TV Programs.

Listen to Mark Kermode!

I often read reviews and watch the trailer. But when I'm unsure I ask my local (physical world) friends who have seen it.

movielens.org baby!

I don't often go out of my way to see trailers, but I appreciate seeing them at the cinema.

Also I am quite aware that good films sometimes have terrible trailers, and vice versa, so I'm quite suspicious of trailers in general as a source of impressions of a film.

I wasn't quite sure how to read 'Read specific reviewers' - I know that some people have favourite film critics whose reviews they specifically refer to, and I don't do that as a rule, but I do fairly often read reviews, and each one is by a specific reviewer in some sense...

My favourite thing to do with new films is know as little as possible about them first. You can find some good stuff this way with no expectations. I did it all the time when I had the Cineworld Unlimited card, unfortunately this also meant I saw a lot of trailers, some of them can really mislead you. There's a Gladiator trailer that advertises it as a forbidden love story.