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Marvel releases an Ant-Man teaser that's too tiny for you to actually see

Marvel releases an Ant-Man teaser that's too tiny for you to actually see

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How badly do you want to see Ant-Man? Because if you want to know what's going to happen in it before everyone else, you have a few days to search out details in the ridiculously small, 100-or-so-pixel-wide preview that Marvel just posted online. This type of video is basically a "teaser teaser," since it's teasing a soon-to-be-released movie teaser (which will eventually be followed by an even longer movie trailer). It's actually the second teaser teaser that Marvel has released in the past 24 hours. Yesterday, we saw one for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Today, it's pulling the same stunt for Ant-Man. This is how you build hype, and while it's more than a little ridiculous to be staring into an "ant-sized" preview of the Ant-Man teaser, yeah, it works.

This is how you build hype in the Marvel Universe

Marvel isn't the only studio that's been using the teaser teaser lately. There were two for both Terminator Genisys and Jurassic World, including one each without any actual footage. Teaser teasers have been effective for big films like these — they get movies' names out there, and they get people talking about them, even when there's next to nothing in the teaser to discuss. It's marketing genius, but it's also such a strange experience for fans: the trailer is cut, ready, and sitting around on a server somewhere waiting for the publish button to be pressed, but it's being held until a more auspicious moment comes up. For Marvel, that's often right in the middle of its own TV shows. Ant-Man's teaser will first air during the series premiere of Agent Carter on Tuesday at 8PM ET on ABC. You can expect a lot more teasers, trailers, teaser trailers, and teaser teasers as we enter superhero madness, which is scheduled to last for the next five years.

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Above: Probably Paul Rudd.