Movie trailer based questions

Question

How do we deal with a question like this: How is Magneto pulling Mystique in the Days of Future Past trailer?

When a question such as this is asked, here is what can happen:

1. Someone knows something based on production notes and gives a spoilerific answer (highly unlikely)
2. Someone knows something based on the original source material (in this case the comics)
3. People start to speculate (most likely)
4. People wait, then give an answer based on what actually happened in the movie.

Why do we not just tell the OP to wait till the movie comes out?

Possibilities in OPs' defense:

• They do not have access to cinemas/movie-rentals (location, time, money etc.) and find it interesting, so they want to know the answer.
• They want to know of the plausibility of a scenario before watching the movie

Answer 1

I think asking questions based strictly on trailer material isn't justification for special treatment.

Just because the movie isn't out yet (or isn't available to the OP) isn't reason to close, or even downvote.

Some questions of this type have been well received in the past (for example, this question on Ender's Game). The question on Magneto and Mystique that sparked this meta question also is fairly well received, with a decent positive overall score.

Note that a question about a trailer can still be a candidate for closure (although not just because it is about a trailer), and you can still downvote if you'd like.

Here's another example of a question about a trailer. In this case, I actually downvoted, because the question was asking about the OP's speculation, and was somewhat (in my opinion) poorly worded. It still received a positive score.

To me, the difference between the first two questions and the third one is that there is plenty of source material available to support answers to the first two that aren't contingent on likely plot points, whereas the third seems to be (again, though, I felt the wording was ambiguous) asking about potentially unanswerable plot points (i.e. "is x flying in that/those particular unit(s)?").

There's plenty of source material documenting Magneto's power in detail. Similarly, there are source references to the uniforms worn in Battle School for Ender's Game.

Answer 2

Personally, I don't have a problem with these kind of questions.

The one you mentioned was asked a couple of weeks before the movie came out (if I remember correctly).

As you said, there were mostly speculations as answers, until the movie came out and I posted what actually happened.

So, a "correct" answer can be given, but with a little delay.

The kind of questions I don't like and vote to close are questions about movies/books that will come out in many years like:

Will the characters in a Song of Ice and Fire manage to X?

A question like this cannot have a correct answer for years.

Answer 3

Downvote. It seems to me that it's a pretty poor question all around. Prior to the movie being released the answers it attracts are going to be speculative (and they were, as we saw - there was even a fair amount of discussion on one answer in comments). After the movie is released, who is actually going to care about that question? The movie is now out, people can go and watch it; if they're looking at questions on here about it then they probably already have.

Downvoting is the mechanism by which we individually say "This doesn't fit into any of the close reasons, it's technically within the rules, but it's still crap content and the site would be better if this wasn't here."

Additional reading on similar topics:

• Are questions that just ask for a description of a plot-point on-topic?
• Should we close questions for being "too trivial"?