I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Pan’s Labyrinth yet. I haven’t seen it, but I understand that the bulk of it is a rather depressing film set in the Spanish Civil War, and that the fantasy elements take up very little of its time. But in the trailer, it’s all fantasy.
When Arachnophobia came out, one set of trailers put all the John Goodman scenes in it (Goodman was particularly “hot” then), and made it look like a Goodman film. He’s actually barely in the flick, and is a pretty minor character.
Most movies these days seem to be niche-targeted. I’ve seen films that have multiple trailers, with different campaigns emphasizing different elements running on different venues (stations, times of day) to lure in those audiences. It frequently seems as if they’re advertising completely different films.
The Break Up. Poorly, misleadingly marketed as an “anti”-romantic comedy, wherein you’re supposedly watching the lead characters fall out of love (but really, fall back in love and appreciate what they’d been missing and yada yada yada). Instead, it’s a good little film about real people’s real problems. I think it would have done better in theaters if folks had known what they were in for when they went to see it.
Pssst! interface2x, post #36.
But I agree. I’ve only seen the video box cover. If it hadn’t been for this thread, I would have thought it was fantasy, too.
The trailers for 28 Days played it up as a goofball comedy (Sandra Bullock goes into rehab for her alcoholism! A laugh riot!). The actual film had light moments, but was much more serious (and much better) than the trailer indicated.
And then there’s the matter of me thinking 28 Days Later was the sequel…
I was finally moved to register an account just to point out one of my own misadvertised favorites. Long time listener, first time caller, etc.
Anyway, I own a copy of My Bodyguard(1980) that was in the comedy section of my local DVD shop. The DVD case talks about the movie like it’s your standard coming-of-age High School comedy, complete with wacky hijinks.
In reality, the movie is about the bleak experiences of kids in an inner-city Chicago school, mainly focusing on bullying, but also touching on aging, responsibility, gender/age roles and death.
I love the movie, and it has its humorous moments, but it’s hardly Porky’s. In fact, I think it’s something a great deal better.
Well, not a whole marketing campaign, but there was one TV trailer for Gladiator made the movie look like a historic romance drama between the gladiator and the Roman woman (“Theirs was the love that could never be”). That trailer contained not one, not two, but ALL the scenes those two characters had together, and I remember thinking that some romance-seeking people would be in for a nasty surprise.
Good lord, you’ve just saved that movie for me! I hated, hated, HATED that film. The ending litterally made me stand up and curse at the screen… But looking at it with the ‘clever witch’ as the protagonist makes the movie 100 times better! Thanks!
I really enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth, but I can see how it may have been misrepresented - I was ready for the violence because I saw it on the recommendation of a friend.
I think Last Action Hero is a movie that suffered for this - billed as a Schwartzenegger action film, it’s really a parody of an action film and a meta-story about an actor who wants to do comedy instead of action. Most people I spoke to about it hated the film. I really liked it.
Er, I’m really trying to think of the name of the film now, that I got the impression was marketed as a light-hearted comedy and just totally wasn’t. Um… Riding in Cars With Boys, that’s the one.
I remember seeing some trailers for The Weatherman (Nicholas Cage) a while back and getting the impression that it was about a weatherman who was tired of being picked on for getting the forecast wrong who finally went crazy and started shooting people with arrows.
I rented it this past weekend and almost all the way through as he encounters situation after situation in which it seems he might snap, I was dreading the foreshadowed snap. He never snapped so the movie turned out to be a really moving story about a guy coming to terms with his life even though he feels like a failure. Great movie, btw.
I second Click - I let my daughter rent it because I thought it was going to be a light-hearted comedy about a guy using a remote to help control his life and the wacky hijinks. Wound up watching a film that had a few funny moments (thanks to Christopher Walken) but really had us darn near in tears.
Really? Watching the trailers, I never thought the characters had sex. It didn’t seem implied at all to me.
One that sticks out in my mind was A Walk To Remember. It was marketed as this sweet love story between the bad boy and the preacher’s daughter who redeems him. Which was true, until halfway through the movie when you realize she’s going to die.
When I watch romances (rarely), I want the happy ending. I want them to end up together and believe that everything will be fine in the future.
I don’t want one of the characters dead, leaving the other to live out their life alone. Same thing happened in City of Angels, only at least there I didn’t start crying halfway through the movie right through to the end (though thinking on it, part of that was probably a result of early pregnancy).
I liked it, too. I thought it was a clever and well-done parody of Schwartzenegger’s typical type of films.
The Village – trailers made it look like something it wasn’t. They had to build up some of the suspense, but they made the movie look like it was going to be some kind of all-out war between the villagers and whatever was in the woods. And I think people going in expecting this came out disappointed.
(Personally, I liked the movie, for its actual story and overall feel. It just wasn’t what the trailers seemed to claim).
The trailer for East is East depicts a screwball comedy about the son of a mixed-race couple trying to avoid an arranged marriage. That’s actually only a small part of the story, which deals with the whole family, and arguably has the Pakistani father as the central character; it also has a lot more emotional weight to it, while still being quite funny.
Hudson Hawk is infamous for being misrepresented. It was billed as an action-adventure starring the tough guy from Die Hard— instead it’s an over-the-top action comedy farce with the smartass from Moonlighting. As a result, few people enjoyed it (I’m one of them, though).
Dangerous Beauty, was not, in fact, a Skinemax soft-core fluff piece, but a serious period drama about a little explored (in cinema) period of history with a strongly feminist bent and startlingly few anachronisms or historical inaccuracies.
The thing I hated about “Pleasantville” as how the colored vs black-and-white tension was handled.
It annoyed me that only positive emotions were given color…love and so forth. But as soon as the bland conformist black-and-white people experienced hatred and fear of the colored people, why didn’t they become colored too? Hatred and fear are genuine passionate emotions.
I never saw it in the theaters, but on the DVD for The Age of Innocence is a trailer with scenes of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska discussing May, cut to make it look like the two have some sinister designs upon the young girl–as if the movie were a sort of 1870s version of Dangerous Liaisons with Michelle Pfeiffer in the Glenn Close role.
On the DVD for the theatrical version of Fellowship of the Ring is one odd trailer that makes it look like LOTR is a horror movie. There are shots of Frodo wandering around a darkened and spooky Bag End, and the Fellowship walking through in dark and spooky Moria.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but isn’t there one scene near the end, during the trial, when Big Bob bleeds into colour (with a shocked gasp from everyone around him) as he yells at David?
Hu-uh? Isn’t the climax of the movie when the mayor (“Big Bob”, played by J.T. Walsh) gets sufficiently angry at David to colorize himself? Prior to that, the black-and-white townspeople were smirky and condescending and hostile, but I don’t recall overt hatred or fear.
I recall seeing a Vanilla Sky trailer that painted it as a Fugitive-type suspense where rich playboy is framed for murder. That’s part of the plot I guess, but you don’t have the sense that it’s actually going to be two hours of Cameron Crowe licking himself. Just like Benny the Dog.