In film advertising, movie trailer plays a crucial role in the success of a movie; while in a trailer, the voice-over narration does great help in informing, persuading and impressing the viewers. A voice-over narration encodes both the narrative and promotional messages in its text and directly 'tell' and 'sell' the film to its audience. As one of the main components in movie trailers, voice-over narration has developed into a text with its own patterns and linguistic features; the communication between the film company and the viewers is also achieved by using a voice-over narration in a movie trailer. With the purpose of providing a comparatively comprehensive description to this type of texts in which both narrative and persuasive messages conjoined, this paper investigates the general patterns, specific discursive and linguistic features of the voice-over narration of contemporary movie trailers which range from 1980 to 2011. The analysis is based on the trailer corpus built for this study which contains a total number of 318 theatrical trailers collected mainly from three online websites . A top-down analytical approach is adopted in the analysis on the general and linguistic features of voice-over narration. In addition, a historical analysis is also conducted so as to provide description to the changes on voice-over narration as well as the movie trailers from other aspect.