We present a method to classify movies on the basis of audio-visual cues present in the previews. A preview summarizes the main idea of a movie providing suitable amount of information to perform the genre classification. In our approach movies are initially classified into action and non-action by computing the visual disturbance feature and average shot length of every movie. Visual disturbance is defined as a measure of motion content in a clip. Next we use color, audio and cinematic principles for further classification into comedy, horror, drama/other and movies containing explosions and gunfir e. This work is a step towards automatically building and updating video database, thus resulting in minimum human intervention. Other potential applications include browsing and retrieval of videos on the Internet (video-on-demand), video libraries, and rating of the movies.