Another vote for Fight Club. As mentioned above I just assumed it was about a bunch of guys that had a club and they had fights. I only watched it because I was heading out for the night with some friends and my roommates had it on. We stopped in their room to say bye. We were waiting for a lull in the movie so we could tell them we were leaving and 20 minutes later we all found ourselves sitting on the bed (coats still on) glued to the TV screen.
The other one, off the top of my head, is Hot Tub Time Machine. I don’t remember the commercials for it, but I wrote it off as a stupid movie just based on the name. Netflix Instant kept bugging me to watch it and one night I just sort of wanted something ‘dumb’ to watch that didn’t involve any thinking. Holy Crap. I went in expecting Bill and Ted and got Back To The Future. To anyone that hasn’t seen HTTM, go rent it. The comedy is on par with The Hangover, but the story/plot is just shy of BTTF. If you’ve been ignoring it because of the stupid name I can almost guarantee that after you watch it you’ll be telling all your friends to watch it too. It’s not the kind of movie you can put on ‘in the background’ or expect to be able to keep up with if you wander in and out of the room a bunch of times (though the comedy will still hold up). Don’t get me wrong, it’s no Usual Suspects of Jackie Brown. You won’t be utterly lost if you blink, but it will stand up to the ‘intellectual crowd’ so to speak. (ETA…the intellectual crowd that’s looking for an easy to watch comedy).
Also, an honorable mention to Sex Drive. Again, don’t remember any commercials for it, and I would have written if off based on the name. But it was just ‘on’ one day and I watched about 20 minutes of it before I looked at the name of it. This, unlike HTTB, is a good background movie, but it was still good overall.
Another one I just thought of, Zombieland. I had seen the commercials and I knew I wasn’t the target demographic for it. Nothing about it appealed to me and I just sort of blew it off as another ‘teen romp’ style movie. I know, I know. It’s not really a teen romp, but it seemed to come from the same place. But then everyone was talking about it so I finally got around to watching it. Way better then I expected.
Slightly off topic but here’s a link to an article about “John Carter”, a movie that was a marketing fail for everybody. (that movie also gets my vote as worst title ever).
I’m kinda hazy on the details, since it wasn’t that memorable a movie, but the marketing for the dragon movie “Reign of Fire” seemed to use a lot of footage and dialogue that wasn’t actually in the film. The impression I got was that it was going to be a basic Godzilla type monster movie, with dragons attacking modern cities and fighting helicopters and stuff, instead it was a post-apocalyptic movie where a scrappy band of surviving humans have to fight a dragon.
I can’t really explain it, but Tangled had the worst trailers ever. If it wasn’t Disney’s 50th (in the animated canon) I would have avoided it like the plague. The movie? Excellent, nothing like the marketing at all.
Although i sort of understand why they did it this way, and not just in terms of getting people to see the movie. I think that a considerable part of the movie’s attraction is that it reveals its depth as it goes along, and watching it all unfold in such an unexpected way was, for me, a big part of the pleasure i took in the movie.
I should have been their audience. I’m a chick who likes SF/F, but I haven’t read those books, so I wouldn’t be all judgey judgey if they got it “wrong” from the book, right?
The first time I saw the trailer, I thought, “Huh, I wonder if that’s that John Carter of Mars book that people talk about. I’ll pay more attention next time I see the trailer.”
So the second time, I was paying attention. Is this, or is this not, John Carter of Mars? And is that the right name? Wasn’t that from Terminator…no, no, that was Connor… Still couldn’t figure it out. Either I was distracted pondering whether or not I had the right name in my head, or there was no clear indication that the film was SF, much less that it was that particular story. It looked like, as the article says, “sword-and-sandals gladiator picture.”
I figured I’d wait a bit to see it, since I still wasn’t clear on what it was, exactly. I guessed that if it was worth seeing, I’d hear the buzz.
Been pretty much crickets ever since. Maybe I’ll catch it on Redbox.
That’s entirely right and the reviews at the time were quite scathing of the marketing. I mean, look at the poster:
Dragons over London, fighting army helicoptors. BAD ASS. But as you say, what we got was a completely different film and all that action happened in voiceover, drawings and newspaper headlines:
I still liked the film (I saw it in the cinema on release) but it just wasn’t what it was hyped as.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned The Phantom Menace. Trailer for that looked pretty good. Remember?
The OP talks about such a case, but the question you mention is not explicited. The explicit question was “what film totally failed in marketing to you” and that movie did: it failed to get my money, despite being, on paper, a movie that I would have gone to watch on opening day.
If their ads hadn’t shown one itty bitty piece which told me they’d shredded the parts of the book which drove me to tears of laughter, the movie would still have gotten my money, shredding notwithstanding.
I have to say Hugo is not at all the movie the trailers painted it as. It seems to have a completely different agenda than what I was expecting. It’s like watching The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and expecting Raiders of the Lost Ark, but instead getting a unique and only mildly entertaining history lesson.
I didn’t like the trailers for this as it made it look like Starship Troopers.
However, I dragged my daughter to it because I love Michael Chabon’s books and he wrote the screenplay. We both really enjoyed the film. In fact, she had me load the books on her Kindle and she loathes most scifi.
Go ahead and see it, if you can still find it in the theaters. The basic premise is that John Carter, civil war veteran, finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars. Due to the lower gravity, he basically has superpowers, and ends up saving the world and getting the girl. And the visuals are spectacular, so it really would benefit from seeing it on the big screen (and in 3D, if you go for that). It’s not “oh-my-god-epic-that-was-amazing”, but it is a good movie.
Indeed—I actually liked the first trailer (with the Peter Gabriel song n’all), 'thought it was a pretty good introduction to the story, aside from the title…but later on, I realized that’s probably because I was at least vaguely aware of what the story was, even if I hadn’t read it yet. Having at least enough knowledge of Latin to make a guess of what an inscription featured in one shot (as well as guessing what the inscription was on, which is plot relevant!) probably helped, too. :smack:
My inner huckster also can’t help wondering if they’d have gotten more interest by not only leaving “of Mars” in the title, but by digitally correcting the color of the soil in the “Mars” scenes to be red, or even just filming in Arizona. 'Make it look a little more “alien world” and less “Conan knockoff”-ey.
I wonder how many people thought John Carter was about Noah Wyle fighting aliens and skipped it. Noah Wyle fighting aliens, what a silly idea…
(Great post about Last Action Hero up there. Couldn’t agree more)
I came in to say Bridge to Terabithia. The trailers left out more than a few details , it was basically advertised as a Narnia ripoff. Worst trailer I’ve ever seen vis a vis the content of the actual movie, which was much much better than I expected. I almost didin’t go see it.
The trailer for Shawshank Redemption, with Morgan Freeman voiceover, and the convict feeding a bird hidden in his pocket, and shots of the star, Tim Robbins, made me sure the movie was entirely a " all imprisonment is unfair" type movie. That is part of the movie, but not all of it. And I wouldn’t have avoided the film if they just said … “Stephen King wrote a story. It doesn’t contain the supernatural. We made it into a movie.”
I didn’t see it because the advertising made it look like they’d butchered the book and basically just kept the title. I later heard the movie was reasonably faithful to the book, which must have come as a surprise to people who went in expecting a Chronicles of Narnia-esque fantasy about children transported to a magical realm.
Boiling Point, starring Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper. It was advertised an an action film, but it was more of a character drama. A friend and I rented it looking for some mindless action films, and we were disappointed as we were thoroughly entertained.
