Gwyneth Paltrow’s View from the Top seemed (to me anyway) to have been portrayed as a satirical dark comedy about working for a low budget airline. Turns out her character gets, then quits that job in the first 10 minutes of the movie, which then becomes a rather typical and dull romantic comedy chick-flick.
The classic one for me is one of my favourite movies - Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. I still remember the ads for that which went something like ‘Head crushing, hand eating, ultra violent fun’. The film itself is an art film that has probably three minutes of violence in the entire 110 minutes or so of the movie. A pity that I’m sure lots of people saw it and were bored stiff by it due to the lack of ‘action’, and lots of people who would have liked it probably gave it a miss.
Yeah I remember the movie but he only thing I remember about the trailers was the logo. It’s possible we only saw a teaser trailer with the logo only which would have been more ambiguous than the straight up trailer. My told me she thought it would be like ET, but Alien came out before ET so I don’t know what movie she had really been thinking of back then. But in terms of movies and things she was pretty cool. She took me to see any movie she would see, ditto for television. Anything that I wasn’t mature enough to understand I just either didn’t notice or I thought about it in simpler terms.
I guess that could have been true for some people, but I think anyone who knew anything about M Night Shamalan movies were expecting there to be a twist. And of course, for the twist to work, the trailer had to be somewhat misleading. I think in movies where a twist or deception is part of the plot itself, having a misleading trailer is actually a good thing.
I think Alien and its sequels have been the most mentioned films so far.
A similar case to the first film in that series, but even more egregious, would be Event Horizon. Trailers pitched it as a science fiction movie. In reality, it was pretty much a straight-up horror film that happened to take place on a space ship. I expected Alien, and I got “Hellraiser on the Nostromo.”
Tell me about it. I made the mistake of taking a fairly new girlfriend to see that, and it scared the bejeezus out of her – and not in a good way. Took a while to get back on track after that one!
Anyone remember the trailer to Bad Santa? I wonder if it was misleading. I loved the movie, but plenty of people complained that it wasn’t a kid’s movie.
No, it’s more of a cry-your-eyeballs out story. Relationships, abandonment, death, broken trust…
Damn! I’ve never seen a posting with which i agreed more>
I came in to post this one. And it wasn’t even a good horror movie. I should have walked out of the damned theater.
When I was about nine years a friend’s mother took us to see “Dune”. We were all a bunch of young sci-fi nerds who wanted to see it. She was a very prim, proper, older Jewish woman.
I’ve never seen someone so apologetic or horrified. I don’t know exactly what she was expecting…
-Joe
Does anyone remember the teaser trailers for ET, which made it look like it was going to be a pants-crappingly terrifying sci-fi thriller, like Alien?
I remember that. I never saw the movie, but I never got the impression it was a kid’s movie, so the trailer’s can’t have been that misleading. It just looked like a sort of dark-ish commedy about a drunk santa. Which could also be the wrong impressions, as I never did see it.
I too was mislead by the poster art for Pan’s Labrynth. I did read some reviews before I saw it though, so before I saw it I did know that it wasn’t totally fantasy. Great movie.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could see ads for Alien and not realize what it was going to be.
The ads for Dark Star were completely misleading. The original ads gave no idea that it was a dark comedy. I thought it was going to be a serios SF movie about an alien loose on a starship – what Alien turned out to be, in other words. Suspicious that Dan O’Bannon wrote both of them (along, in the case of Alien, with everyone else). He also played Pinback in Dark Star.
(FWIW, I thought Aliens far superior , and better SF than Alien, which struck me as an atmospheric but stupid horror flick, and not up to the SF standards of its obvious source, Jerome Bixby’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space)
I remember ET being marketed as a sci-fi spectacular directed by Spielberg!
There is no action in the whole movie. What a bore-fest!
The Return - you can see the trailer here
When I first saw the trailer what I took away from it was this: a girl on a business trip ends up in an inn and is menaced by an angry spirit of someone killed there long ago. That ain’t what happens.
Anything with Jim Carrey seems to get marketed as a comedy. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was surreal, absurdist, quirky, at times even funny, but it was most definitely not a comedy. There were quite a few scenes that were deliberately and actively dark and disturbing. I’m glad I watched it on the recommendation of a friend with similar tastes in movies, and not based on blurbs from reviewers who don’t seem to have actually watched it. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett are almost unrecognizable because they disappear into their roles, and I think they were cast against type on purpose.
“A romantic comedy unlike any other” my ass. The two main characters hurt each other over and over, even though they love each other and seem to be inextricably attracted no matter what happens to them. Two of the main themes are loss, and how even when you love someone you sometimes just can’t be together without turmoil and pain.
Holy Man, with Eddie Murphy, was another movie marketed as a comedy that wasn’t really a comedy at all.
No specific examples come to mind, but I’ve seen trailers that turned me off from seeing a movie because they make it look like a typical brainless comedy or action movie by offering up all the funny scenes or all the action scenes in the trailer. If I later happen to actually watch the movie, there’s definitely a disconnect. I’ve watched at least a couple films where I thought the movie was good but if I’d gone by the trailer I would have thought that it was total crap.