Pineapple Express-
Just saw this tonight, absolutely hilarious drug comedy in the sense of Half Baked. I remember seeing the ads for this which looked like some kind of action movie/buddy comedy which contained cherry picked scenes and misrepresented the movie.
Pineapple Express had perhaps the greatest movie trailer ever. But when I saw it I thought it’d be a more, how should I say, realistic comedy in the vein of Superbad. When I first saw it I just thought it was OK because it wasn’t quite what I’d expected. Now it’s one of my favorites.
Edit: So I’m saying its marketing failed for me, too, but in a different way.
Tropic Thunder
It looked funny, ended up being a painful journey to disappointment.
Sirenity had bad commercials, but was a great movie.
Fight Club. The trailers made it look like a straightforward action(ish) movie about guys beating each other up, with not even a hint at the deeper aspects of the plot. They actually made me actively avoid seeing it in theaters. When I eventually did see it, I loved it.
Clash of the Titans (remake) had a trailer that made it look like a fun action romp, it wasn’t. Similarly Immortals had a trailer that made it look like what Clash of the Titans was, it ended up being more or less what I wanted Clash to be.
The Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Action Hero was a fairly intelligent satire of the action movie genre, with some interesting, and well done, takes on the absurdities accepted within the genre - but because the film was marketed as just another Schwarzenegger action film it failed with the audience that was brought in by the advertising, and the audience that might have enjoyed the satire mostly stayed away from the movie.
Inglorious Basterds-Tarantino version
Still one of my favorite films but I know a lot of people who were disappointed by it since there was so little Basterds action in it that seemed to be promised by Brad Pitts character in the trailer.
They lost me with their soap logo on the poster which only works if you’ve already seen the movie.
Yep, same here. I remember seeing the trailer and thinking “It’s just Brad Pitt fighting, who really wants to see that?” I finally saw it a few years latter and was really mad that I hadn’t seen it earlier.
Starship Troopers.
The things they changed are the ones I liked best about the book. I feel about it like my niece would feel about someone trying to tell her that Snow White was actually a bearded hunchback. Since those changes featured prominently in the promotion, I made some extremely impolite noises and refrained from watching it.
Swing Shift.
It looked like a slapstick comedy, but ended up being a female buddy movie.
Wouldn’t that be the exact opposite of the OP? The marketing told you you would not be interested in this movie, and it was correct.
The OP asks what movies did such a bad/inaccurate job of marketing themselves, that you were lead to expect a different movie based on what was advertised (for good or for bad).
The Princess Bride. Between the title and the movie posters that prominently featured Robin Wright, it sold itself as a period romance. I avoided that movie for over a decade before ending up watching it at a party. We’ve been inseparable ever since.
Definitely watch the Tarantino version. The Merchant-Ivory version wasn’t that great.
I’m guessing the trailers for Bridge to Terabithia and Marley and Me left out a few details.
Hancock. The first part of the movie with Will Smith as the dysfunctional superhero was fantastic. The second half of the movie with Charlize Theron was bizarre and took me out of the experience. It was marketed as a superhero movie, but it only half delivered.
Surely, a bad movie which you went to see because the ads made you think it would be good is an example of successful marketing (but a failed movie), no? The marketing department’s job isn’t to give you an accurate sense of the movie; it’s to get you to buy a ticket.
My nomination would be 12 Monkeys. The ads made it look like dreck, and I only ever watched it because a friend had it on and I didn’t want to be rude. Turns out it’s the best time-travel movie I’ve ever seen.
And I’ll agree that the marketing for Princess Bride was way off the mark, too, but I didn’t see any of the ads until decades after I saw and loved the movie itself, so the marketing never actually had a chance to fail me there.
In the late '90s I remember hearing some buzz about an upcoming movie set in the glam rock era. I was interested in '70s rock and probably would have gone to see it, but the trailer made it look like a whodunnit murder mystery and I wasn’t really interested in that sort of thing.
The movie was Velvet Goldmine, which I did wind up seeing several years later and enjoyed a lot. But people who went in expecting a whodunnit murder mystery were probably disappointed, as there isn’t even a murder. There’s a scene in the movie (included in the trailer) where it looks like someone has been shot, but it’s almost immediately revealed that the whole thing was staged. This all happens right after the title sequence, so anyone expecting a murder mystery would be facing nearly two hours of a movie that bore little resemblance to the trailer.
In fairness to the marketing team, Velvet Goldmine is a difficult movie to summarize or explain and it must have been hard to come up with a trailer that would make people want to go see it…especially since they probably couldn’t run one that just said “Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale have a sex scene in this movie.”
I’m one of the few people I know who actually saw The Princess Bride in the theater when it was originally released. My family went based on the recommendation of one of my mother’s friends. I don’t remember seeing any of the ads at the time, but when I got the DVD years later I saw the original trailer and realized why this movie did so badly at the box office. Yeesh. Not only is it bad and cheesy, it manages to spoil nearly every plot twist without giving a clear idea of what the main plot even is!
The Iron Giant. I saw it, but in spite of the marketing instead of because of it.
It’s a sweet story about a boy and his robot set in the height of Cold War hysteria; it has a wonderful anti-violence message (Hogarth, the boy, teaches a sixty-foot-tall killing machine from outer space that he doesn’t have to be a gun if he doesn’t want to – he can be Superman instead). Did they market it this way?
No, they did not.
Someone at the studio or the ad agency said, “We need to do something to sucker teenage boys into seeing this movie. I know, let’s take the one battle sequence completely out of context and make the movie look violent and Transformers-y.”
The end result, of course, was that teenage boys quickly told each other that the marketing campaign was bogus, and the movie’s real core audience (moms with younger kids) stayed away.
DAMN it, I still get mad when I think about it. I force people to watch the movie whenever I find out they haven’t.
OtakuLoki, I agree 100% with your take on The Last Action Hero.
It didn’t affect me, but the marketing of Angel Eyes was a travesty. It was marketed as a Sixth-Sense-type thriller/mystery, starring JLO!!! when in actuality it’s a quiet, beautiful, poignant little love story about two damaged people who find each other.
Aw, that’s too bad. My funny bone is very different. It’s rude and crude and very un-PC, but still I think Tropic Thunder is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in the last several decades. To me besides being funny as hell, it’s smart and insightful. Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise have all the best lines and steal the movie, but it’s a great cast all around and everyone has moments to shine.
