Before screenings of Meet Joe Black, movie houses across the country debuted the 131-second trailer for The Phantom Menace, the first prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, slated for the summer of 1999. The result was a phenomenon that had never happened before and hadn’t even been imagined as a prospect: There were numerous reports of people buying full-priced tickets for Meet Joe Black,[*] watching the Phantom Menace trailer, and then immediately exiting the theater.
