For example - trailers that seem to show a movie is a comedy. Then the movie is a drama. I would put forward ‘The Truman show’. I thought it was going to be a comedy. The trailer showed two jokes. The movie starred Jim Carrey. Fair assumption, I thought. Turns out the movie only had two jokes.
Same with ‘Click’. Has two jokes but is marketed as a comedy.
“Very Bad Things” was marketed as a dark comedy.
I’ll say it was dark.
-Joe
I think the worst offender has got to be the Sylvester Stallone movie Avenging Angelo. The American previews made it look like it was a super dark revenge movie. Actually, it’s not. It’s in fact the shittiest comedy ever made.
The Man Who Loved Women. Though it had its slapstick moments, it was really a serious film about the nature of love. It would have done better being marketed as a chick flick instead of a comedy.
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy would have been better marketed as a serious film (which it is – the movie is quite bleak) instead of a comedy.
“Bridge to Terabithia” is the biggest offender I can think of. The trailers made it look like a fantasy. It’s really really not.
Boat Trip - it was a comedy (albeit not a very good one) and was marketed as such. But nowhere in the ads or on the cover of the DVD was there any hint that the main plot of the movie was that the two main characters were straight men impersonating homosexuals - which is like advertising Some Like It Hot without mentioning that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis impersonated women. My guess is that the company worried that some potential buyers might not want to buy a “gay” movie. But didn’t they think these same people might be upset when they found out they had bought one without knowing?
Uptown Girls, marketed as a whacky comedy about a girl who becomes a nanny to a little girl who’s a bit mean, and the hijinks that ensue. In reality, a dark drama about death and desertion.
Pretty much any movie with Adam Sandler is marketed as if it were funny.
The title and trailer of “Black Snake Moan” certainly implied to me the main characters have sex, but they don’t. In fact, there is zero sexual tension between them at all, although sex is a major part of the plot.
The Incredibles: Similar to the OP, I was fooled into thinking this movie was a comedy by the looks of the first trailer, and was sorely disappointed to discover it was a mere action movie.
Thankfully, I did come to appreciate it more upon a second viewing a few years later, since I at least knew what to expect.
Wow, nobody mentioned Life is Beautiful yet? If you’ve seen it, the first half is generally comedy and the second half… isn’t. I only saw trailers after it won big at the Oscars, and the trailers only showed the first half. If you didn’t know any better you’d be in for a very nasty surprise.
Meet Joe Black was marketted as a romance. While the romance in the movie is a relatively good portion of the movie, the main character of the movie is Anthony Hopkins, not one of the couple. It’s a movie about dying and making the best of life.
I"d also say The Cable Guy was also marketed as a comedy. While it is a very dark comedy, it was marketed incorrectly and didn’t do as well as it should have. I really liked both The Truman Show as well as The Cable Guy.
Roger Ebert had a line about how trailers reflect the movie the studios wish they’d made, rather than the one they actually did.
You didn’t think The Incredibles was funny?
(scratches head in disbelief)
Anyhow, the trailers for Fools Rush In with Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek made it look like a fairly standard romantic comedy, presumably based on what the studio thought people would be looking for from Chandler Bing. In fact, it was a more serious (and fairly decent) romantic drama about cultural intersections and conflicts.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose is primarily a courtroom drama/morality play, NOT a horror movie as advertised. The trailers edited VERY selectively to make it look scary (There are a couple of scary scenes, but they are incidental to the film).
Angel Eyes is a good example. It was marketed as a sinister, scary, eerie-type mystery, a la The Sixth Sense, when in fact it’s a very moving, beautiful character study/love story about two outsiders drawn to each other.
Yes, but wasn’t what you ended up with pretty wonderful? I thought so. The movie starts out as if it’s going to be an exploitation film, then turns into an engrossing drama, then turns out to be downright heartwarming, but not in a cheezy way. For me anyway. It’s one of my favorite films of the year so far.
I had no idea that Uptown Girls wasn’t a dumb, scratch-your-eyeballs-out comedy!
Yeah, I should’ve noted there IS tension between Samuel L. Jackson’s and Christina Ricci’s characters, just not the sexual kind.
I didn’t like the movie as much as you did; it would’ve been fine with me if it had been an exploitation film. I went to see it partly because I was so tickled by the salaciousness of its marketing. But I appreciated it for what it was.
I thought it was funny…
I didn’t say it wasn’t funny; sure it had funny elements, but they were relatively few and far between, and none made me laugh as hard as the trailer.