BEAT: Rhythm-Elastic Alignment for Agentic Music-guided Movie Trailer Generation

Automatic movie trailer generation selects shots from a full-length film and synchronizes them with chosen music. Existing methods either relegate music alignment to post-processing or enforce rigid one-to-one shot-music mappings, overlooking that professional editing rhythm is elastic: energetic passages favor rapid cuts, while quieter passages allow shots to span multiple bars. We introduce BEAT, a framework that addresses this gap with two core components: MuVA, a compact music-visual alignment encoder trained with Sinkhorn-regularized two-stage learning, and Bar-DP, an energy-adaptive dynamic programming algorithm that produces elastic many-to-one alignments. These components are integrated into a five-phase agentic pipeline that grounds the core alignment in learned cross-modal features while coordinating higher-level creative decisions through structured text signals. To support comprehensive evaluation, we also introduce TrailerArena, a benchmark with 20+ metrics across four complementary dimensions. On TrailerArena, BEAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across shot selection, ordering, and perceptual quality, while producing fully composed trailers end-to-end.