How could you make a trailer for a movie of Bridge to Terebithia without either misleading the people who see the trailer about what kind of a movie it will or else blowing the twist at the end? It’s generally considered one of the top children’s books of all time. It’s also a book that you shouldn’t know about the ending before you read it.
Yeah, but at the time, I recall a post here where the poster took their child’s friends to the movie as a birthday outing, and had to deal with the mass trauma.
That was me. I’m in England and the book was never big here.
But yeah, the point was that “How could you make a trailer for a movie of Bridge to Terebithia without either misleading the people who see the trailer about what kind of a movie it will be.” That’s exactly what they did. In the movie, the twist occurred about halfway through, not at the end, but it still seemed like there might be another twist and Terebithia really was real.
It would have been a fine movie to watch at another time, but not really suitable for a child’s birthday outing.
It wasn’t meant to be representative of an actual scene. It was meant to metaphorically sketch the characters - which it did perfectly.
I thought the hero was the director, who decided to kick Segal’s sorry ass out of the movie early.
Boiling Point, with Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper, was billed as a typical police action film. A friend and I rented it one day looking for some mindless entertainment. It’s much more of a character drama. It didn’t do well, but given what we were expecting we rather enjoyed it.
It wasn’t a trailer but I didn’t watch The Sopranos until well into its first season because HBO’s marketing tried to make it sound like a comedy and I thought it was going to be Analyze This: The TV Series.
The show has very funny moments but they made it sound like a laugh riot with a light tone and I wasn’t interested.
The trailers for Annihilation (2018) made it seem like an interesting sci-fi movie with some cool action scenes. It wasn’t.
Every time this subject comes up Bicentennial Man is my example as well. I found the theatrical trailer on Youtube and watched it again just to make sure I wasn’t remembering it incorrectly. The trailer certainly made it seem as though it was a far more lighthearted movie than it was.
Downsizing comes to mind. The movie made it seem like it would be about the benefits and pitfalls of being miniaturized and what would come of that. The premise was talked about for the first hour and then went off the rails into something I still haven’t understood.
Cold Creek Manor gave off the impression that it has a supernatural angle to it. Instead it was a deadly dull and terrible mystery thriller with zero surprises in the script. I would have thought it was just me but I had a co-worker a few years later mention the same thing.
I know someone who went to Saturday Night Fever thinking it was just about disco dancing. Boy was she surprised by the actual story.
I’m not sure the people who made *Downsizing *understood what it was about either. There were about four plotlines fighting for dominance and none of them won.
Yes, there’s about three minutes of actual dancing in the entire film. The rest is about a guy trying desperately to find some meaning in his shitty dead-end life.
In the same vein, rewatch Fame (the original) sometime. Do you remember all the upbeat musical and dance numbers? Because most of the film is bleak af.
Not hard SF, you’re right. But I’d argue within the traditions of sci-fi as metaphor for the human condition. One condition in particular, in fact. This says it well:
Warning: massive spoilers for Annihilation!
I thought Saturday Night Fever was a cheerful movie about disco dancing, too, but that’s partly because I’m too young to have watched it when it first came out (or seen the trailer) so all I know is the song and a couple of famous dance scenes - for obvious reasons, they’re the ones that have been parodied to death and talked about a lot rather than the double rape and the suicide. It was an interesting movie, and very well acted, but really fucking dark all the way through.
It’s like I could understand someone going in to watch Muriel’s wedding not expecting it to be the kind of movie it really is. Here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLDcevp5w5o That makes it look like American Pie or something.
But the comments under it seem to say that some people watched a different movie to me. It did have some funny bits and great characters but [spoiler]the Dad treats everyone like shit, the Mum is sidelined out of her daughter’s wedding, the groom is forced into the wedding, the best friend ends up unable to walk and depressed and abandoned by Muriel, and the Mum kills herself, which the Dad uses for his election campaign, and she seems to go unmourned by anyone just like she’d thought she would, none of which is played in a slapstick way. Dark tragicomedy can be brilliant, but I find it very odd that so many people don’t seem to realise that’s what this movie is.