“Bridge to Terabithia” was marketed in the trailers and commercials as children interacting with a fantasy world in an obvious attempt to ride on the coattails of “The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe” which had just come out a little bit earlier. The commercials for BtT were 99% fantasy elements in a movie that had maybe five minutes of fantasy-world. Everyone could have ended the movie alive and well and having a big pizza party and it still would have been horribly marketed and a legitimate disappointment to anyone expecting a Narnia-esque fantasy movie. I remember reading later that the author of BtT was mortified at how Disney marketed the film.
It might have occurred to you that there are people who graduated 6th grade, and high school, and college all before the book was written. It’s only been around since 1977.
I had read and liked the book as a kid, and the trailer put me off the movie because it looked like they’d just taken the title and turned it into a generic kid’s fantasy movie. I did later hear that the movie was more faithful to the book than it seemed, but any interest I’d had in seeing it had already been killed…and learning the marketing campaign was incredibly misleading sure didn’t make me think the movie would actually be any good even if it did follow more or less the same plot as the book.
I was misled by The Science of Sleep trailer into thinking it was another romantic comedy about quirky awkward people hooking up, and I really had no desire to see it. When I finally did watch it, it took me some time to realize that wasn’t what it was - it’s more of a character study that’s kind of painful to watch. I think might have enjoyed that if I hadn’t been looking for the other elements.
The trailer for* Dead Poet’s Society* made it look like it was going to be a laugh riot.
It was not Carpe diem, but Caveat Emptor.
I think it’s what hurt the first Hulk movie.
I haven’t seen it obviously (since it hasn’t come out yet), but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems to be falling into this trap. Depending on what trailer you’re watching it’s a either superhero film, indie rock movie, romantic comedy or relationship revenge flick.
Me neither. I read everything in the library as a kid, have been an English teacher for years, have a kid and still enjoy some YA literature, and BtT was completely unknown to me. Perhaps it’s just not all that famous outside the USA.
I was pretty surprised when I found out Dead Poets Society was so depressing, compared to the trailer.
I knew about BtT since 5th grade or so, and even the Scholastic book catalog the teacher handed out to us kids had a spoiler in the description of the book. I didn’t read it, because I didn’t like books in which people died, being an oversensitive child. Still haven’t read it, or seen the movie.
From the trailers I saw, I was expecting The Savages to be a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family. It turned out to just be a dysfunctional family, sans the dark comedy. Bleh.
We just watched Kick Ass tonight, and it was not at all the movie we thought we were going to see. Hubby said he didn’t enjoy it and that made me a little angry because he’s been anticipating the release. He preordered it from Amazon and it came today. I just don’t like to see him disappointed and he totally was. I managed to enjoy it after realizing it wasn’t what I was expecting.
Little Miss Sunshine was marketed as a happy feel good comedy. Nope. Very melancholy.
Napoleon Dynamite is another one, but I’m not sure if it was because of the editing of the trailer or because the movie just wasn’t good.
That’s what I came in here to post. If I had known how much that final scene would wreck me, I wouldn’t have undertaken the watching of it so blithely.
It didn’t exactly ruin the movie for me, because I LOVE the movie, but the VERY misleading trailer for The Iron Giant ruined the movie’s chances of becoming the beloved smash hit that it deserved to be. Some hollow-chested, syphilitic monkey-fucker in marketing decided that an ad campaign that (completely misleadingly) played up the Giant’s over-the-top arsenal of alien weaponry and the scenes where it fights the Army would sucker teenagers and young men into seeing it, even though that part of the story is a) quite brief and b) makes a very pacifist and nonviolent point in context (the whole point of the Giant’s story arc and its relationship with Hogarth, the human boy who befriends it, is that guns kill, killing is wrong, and the Giant can choose not to be a gun
It’s debatable how many teens and young adults were, in fact, suckered into seeing the movie, but the ad campaign unquestionably turned off parents of smaller children, who stayed away in droves – tragically, because the movie is sweet, has a worthwhile message that isn’t heavy-handed, and would have been a huge hit with families if its own marketing team hadn’t betrayed it.
I’m still filled with dull anger when I think about it, all these years later. I try to do my part to undo the damage with posts in threads like these, as well as forcing people who haven’t seen it to borrow my copy whenever I can.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of movie were you expecting Kick-Ass to be?
Scary Movie 3 was supposed to (according to the trailer) spoof the Hulk and the Matrix. The movie did neither, you could only see those scenes on the DVD. I have absolutely no respect for the franchise after this, although I didn’t learn my lesson until after I watched date movie and superhero movie.
Which means the trailers completely nail the movie, assuming it’s actually faithful to the comic.
I was expecting a comedy involving the antics of some geeks who decide to be “superheros”. I was expecting something more along the lines of Superbad. It was more Kill Bill.
Precious. The trailer kept showing her all glamed up with fun upbeat music. They showed a few scenes like her falling and her mom yelling, but nothing like the movie really was. Depressing from start to finish. It went from bad to worse, and kept descending, with no hope in sight. I was sick.
Predators gave me no indication whatsoever of just how aggressively it was going to rehash Predator, with sizable and intact chunks of Aliens thrown in for good measure.
Speaking as a librarian, I don’t think Bridge to Terabithia is all that popular in the US either. It has a following (mostly among English teachers and children’s librarians), but the kids themselves never seemed to gravitate towards it. Even after the movie I don’t remember it being all that popular.
Contrast it with Because of Winn-Dixie, which was written in 2000 and, again, was really only popular with English teachers and children’s librarians. But after the movie, kids really want to read it now.