Why 80s Trailers Said “In a World…”
Don LaFontaine, the voice that sold a decade of movies.
80s trailers said "In a world..." because of one man: Don LaFontaine. He made the phrase famous and voiced more than 5,000 trailers in a career that lasted 33 years. That's why the business called him "the Voice of God."
The line worked because it did a trailer's hardest job in three words. It built the world fast, so the next sentence could break it. In a world where something is normal, one person changes everything. That's a full story setup, and audiences knew it before the first shot cut in.
In that era, studios leaned on one deep, steady narrator to make a trailer feel like an event. LaFontaine's voice became the shorthand for that. The more often audiences heard it, the more the phrase turned into a genre convention, then a cliché, then a joke.
LaFontaine was in on the joke. In 2006 he made a rare on-screen appearance in a national car-insurance commercial, playing himself and telling a customer, "In a world where both of our cars were totally under water..." The voice that sold thousands of movies ended up selling a punchline about itself.
He died on September 1, 2008, at age 68, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Since then, trailers have mostly dropped the narrator in favor of dialogue, title cards and music cues. When a modern trailer brings back a big voiceover, it's usually a nod to him.
Watch the trailer above with the sound up, then listen for that narrator style in the 80s trailers across our catalog.
Sources: npr.org · today.com · shootonline.com · en.wikipedia.org