Many people, including me, have complained that too many movie trailers these days give away too much. Has any clever director made use of that aggravating trend in contemporary movie trailers to release one that seemed to tell too much… but was actually very misleading?
Give movie titles and then spoiler-box the misleading nature of the trailer, surprises, twists, etc., please. YouTube links are welcome.
Thanks!
I won’t spoiler anything because the movie is too old. But the trailers and commercials for Swing Shift made it look like a wacky Goldie Hawn screwball comedy. It was much more of a drama, sometimes hailed as the first female buddy movie.
Bridge To Terabithia’s trailer made it look like a fantasy adventure, while the trailer to Hancock made it look like a slapstick comedy.
Probably not too many, seeing as the marketing departments seem to want to let you know exactly what you’re getting, and would crap their pants if a director tried to surprise people.
The most misleading trailer I can remember was for the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Angel Eyes. I saw it on a plane. The trailer made the film look like a supernatural thriller along the lines of The Sixth Sense. The movie turned out to be a relationship drama.
And of course, the second trailer for The Phantom Menace made it look like a good movie.
The first trailer for Green with Envy starts out being very misleading. 
Many times when Hollywood is unclear on how to market a film, they’ll promote it as a comedy and feature all the comic scenes in one trailer. The Man Who Loved Women was heavily promoted as a laff riot, with actually it was a generally serious film about the nature of love and relationships.
Executive Decision (1996) with Steven Segal and Kurt Russell came on the heels of several successful Segal movies and the trailer led you to believe that this was another Segal kick-ass action flick.
If you saw the movie, needless to say that was not the case. It still was a kick-ass action movie, but not with Segal.
Oh, I’ve got one here, since I just bought it On Demand after seeing the trailer on Crackle. The Warrior’s Way. Here’s the trailer. Looks kinda like Hero or something, doesn’t it?
I’m not spoiling it b/c I don’t want anyone else to see it, ever.
Here’s what they left out: everything. This movie is a slapstick comedy about how the best assassin in the world travels to the Old West and tries to fit in with a bunch of broadly-drawn carnies in an old-timey circus.
You’ve got Kate Bosworth as the southern fiesty girl with a brutally bad accent, Geoffrey Rush as the town drunk (doing broad comedy so painful I bet he pays the Academy to exclude it in his Lifetime Achievement retrospective), Tony Cox as the plucky midget, bearded ladies, etc. Common scenes are the warrior trying to learn how to do simple tasks like laundry and getting detergent on his face.
Every single sword-like scene in the entire movie is in the trailer. That one at the end, where they all rise up out of the snow? That’s how the movie ends - you don’t even see him fight them.
Hart’s War had a, imho, very misleading trailer, which I do think was on purpose.
The trailer had you believe it’d be an actiony war film, but turned into some lame court-drama.
I think the Heir is looking for examples in which a director, or at least somebody artistically concerned with the film, is deliberately “keeping secrets”–not trailers which are carelessly misleading, or as cynical marketing ploys.
I think the marketing departments want to sell tickets, and will reveal, conceal, or mislead in any combination they imagine will best accomplish this.
Didn’t we have some talk here once about trailers that made use of scenes that weren’t even in the finished films at all?
Catfish.
One of the creepiest trailers I’ve seen in many, many years. Looked like an absolutely brilliant thriller.
Finally saw the film and… Well, it’s not really much of a thriller in the first place.
(Not a bad film by any means, though.)
Grindhouse had a fake trailer called “Don’t” inserted in the intermission of the movie. It’s supposed to be a trailer for a British B-horror movie, but it’s shot in such a way as to prevent the audience realizing the actors are British.
One that I remember after all these years was for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - in it they show Michael Caine and Steve Martin casually strolling along a sidewalk next to a lake, then Steve martin casually pushing a woman into the water. Not in the movie at all.
It’s my (limited) understanding that the director and other people artistically concerned with the film generally have nothing to do with the trailer at all. I could add several more examples to the list of movies where the studio apparently had misleading trailers created because they didn’t know how to market the movie that had actually been made, but I don’t know of any that fit the OP’s request.
IIRC, the trailers for Fight Club made it look like the movie was just about… well, a fight club. Based on those trailers, I expected it to be mostly an action/fight movie, so I skipped it when it was in theaters. A couple of years later, a friend strongly recommended that I watch it, so I rented it and loved it and thought, “That’s not the movie they were advertising.” Of course, they probably made more money by advertising it like they did than if they had tried to be more accurate.
Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams was not the comedy I expected from the trailers.
I remember thinking the white rasta guys were the “upgrades”, i.e. Agents 2.0, in the first Matrix sequel. I’m quite sure the trailer is cut to deliberately give this impression.
You make a strong point, and I agree. While my wife is in “The Industry,” here in Southern California we rarely go to theaters. HDTV coupled with premium movie channels and a DVR we prefer to watch at home and pay about $100 a month.
It appears to this advertising man that theater attendance for two runs about $30 and people are opting out of theaters. It is just too big a production to dress, drive, park, and pay for theater snacks. So, I think movie companies are pulling all the plugs to get people into theaters in a tight economy.
There are two movies that exceeded my expectations from the advertising, and both are currently on the premium channels. First, is “The Hurt Locker” taking the viewer into defusing bombs in Iraq. An Iraq war vet tells me it is quite accurate. HD takes you right into the movie, and it’s uncomfortable violence. Here is the trailer. http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video;_ylt=A2KJke0zYidOTBEAbdWJzbkF?ei=UTF-8&p=The%20hurt%20locker%2C%20trailer&fr2=tab-img&fr=
The second movie is “The Experiment” that shows the animalistic behavior any of us could experience in the right circumstances. Here is the trailer. http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video;_ylt=A0oG7idQXydOEH8AMDRXNyoA?ei=UTF-8&p=The%20experiment&fr2=tab-web&frmoz35
Both are thought provoking films especially for us liberals.
This is a better link to Google, The Hurt Locker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxSDZc8etg
This is a better link to Google,*** The Experiment.*** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W1HlHHQn5o
A trailer for Who Framed Roger Rabbit shows a character (Eddie Valiant?) with a pig head looking into a mirror and saying “I’m a pig!” That scene wasn’t in the movie. But it’s not like the rest of the trailer was misleading in any way.
My wife tells me this is the kind of work she does at her employer. She is a motion picture studio as a ram rod/trouble shooter. Let me preface that all the glamor in the movie industry is just hype. This is a high pressure, detailed oriented business. Movie production is a factory operation with lots of deadlines, and lots of glitches. You remember the stories about the problems with the shark in Steven Spielberg’s* Jaws*, they could not make the damn thing work! So you did not see the shark until almost the end of the movie. I would not want to work in that field, advertising is enough pressure for me.
Studios commit to release dates for pictures sometimes before they have even begun filming. You’ve heard it before, “a big Christmas movie,” or a “Summer Release.” The financial structure of a movie involves millions in a cash outlay long before any money comes in. So, you do get promos before a movie may be finalized in production.
Then comes the big release date. A studio can live or die based upon the first week’s box office. Twentieth Century Fox lost most of it’s back lot to build Century City. Fox had to sell the ground because of the millions they lost in the delays making Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1963. My wife swears she will quit her job at least once a week.