Screen Junkies

Submission 38,720

Part of a series on Recut Movie Trailers / Movie Trailer Remix. [View Related Entries]

About

Screen Junkies is a YouTube channel created and operated by Break Media which features movie trailer parodies that poke fun at both classic and modern Hollywood films by providing tongue-in-cheek commentaries over their official preview footage.

Origin

On February 13th, 2012, Screen Junkies uploaded the pilot episode of Honest Trailers for the 1999 science fiction film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (shown below). In the first two years, the video gained over 5.7 million views and over 6,500 comments.

Spread

On March 22nd, 2012, Screen Junkies uploaded an honest trailer for the 2008 fantasy film Twilight (shown below, left), which garnered upwards of 9.1 million views and over 10,800 comments within two years. On April 5th, a parody trailer for the 1997 romantic disaster film Titantic was uploaded to the Screen Junkies channel. In 2 years, the video accumulated more than 11.8 million views and over 7,700 comments.

On April 8th, 2013, a page for "Web Video: Honest Trailers" was created on the trope database TV Tropes,^[3] listing the web series as an example of the "MundaneButAwesome," "Brutal Honesty" and "Affectionate Parody" tropes. On May 17th, an honest trailer for the 2007 science fiction film Transformers (shown below, left) was uploaded to the Screen Junkies YouTube channel, which garnered over 8.9 million views and over 6,100 comments in the first 2 years. On May 19th, a Facebook^[2] page titled "Honest Trailers" was launched, receiving upwards of 9,500 likes in the following year. On September 24th, Screen Junkies uploaded a parody trailer for the 2012 superhero film The Avengers (shown below, right). In 2 years, the video gained more than 10.7 million views and over 22,100 comments.

On May 30th, 2013, the pop culture blog Culture Mass^[4] published an article titled "Nicolas Cage, Honest Trailers and the Culture of Negativity," which argued that the Honest Trailers series exposes a negative and overly critical mindset present in youth culture.

On March 8th 2014, Screen Junkies partnered with Smosh Games to release a video titled "MARIO KART (Honest Game Trailers)." As of October 2014, the video has gained over 5.1 million views and more than 5,500 comments and are continuing to release more videos of other popular games.

Andy Signore Sexual Harassment Allegations

On October 5th, 2017, Emma Bowers published a post on Facebook^[5] which accused Screen Junkies creator Andy Signore of asking her if he could masturbate in front of her while she was his intern (shown below). Later that evening, Bowers published screenshots of the post on Twitter, where they received more than 10,100 likes and 5,300 retweets.^[6]

On October 6th, YouTuber April Dawn tweeted a statement accusing Signore of sexual harassment, cleaiming that the Screen Junkies HR department did not take her seriously when confronted (shown below, left).^[7] That same day, Twitter user @BeckyMoore83 tweeted a screenshot of an email from Signore asking her to be "secret pen pals" (shown below, right).

On October 8th, Defy Media released a statement announcing that Signore's employment at Screen Junkies had been terminated over the allegations (shown below).^[8]