Fight Club, as mentioned up thread.
The Princess Bride - I thought it was going to be some sappy kid’s movie.
Dr. Strangelove - from the title, not expecting a black comedy about nuclear annihilation.
Heathers - again, not expecting a black comedy.
And probably not in the spirit of the OP, but Punchline, which I expected to be a hilarious comedy about doing stand-up, but which actually sucked donkey balls.
Drive with Ryan Gosling fooled a lot of people, the trailers made it look something like a stylish version of Fast & Furious, but it was really a slow noir type movie rather than action.
The 1981 Pennies from Heaven. I thought it was going to be Steve Martin’s latest wacky comedy.
Once a friend and I wanted to see a movie but didn’t want anything violent. Being animal lovers, we chose a documentary about jungle animals.
It was the most violent movie I’ve ever seen, basically 90 minutes of monkeys having their brains bashed out in various ways.
The first David Lynch movie I saw was Dune. I loved it (I have been told I set a pretty low bar sometimes for sci-fi movies…). A few years later I saw Blue Velvet. It was not what I expected…
A few years after that, Twin Peaks aired, and I watched a few episodes to see if it was made by the guy who made Dune, or the guy who made Blue Velvet. The latter, for those who are wondering.
It’s not completely on topic, but the oral history of “Office Space” is fascinating w/r/t the creative view versus the studio / marketing approach.
I’d say the promotional materials weren’t misleading, but they definitely didn’t accurately convey the movie.
Going In Style George Burns in what looked from the trailers to be a funny comedy about old people robbing banks. Almost all the old guys die. Bittersweet, not at all bad, but not a riotous comedy.
Pennies From Heaven Steve Martin & Bernadette Peters lip sync and dance through the Great Depression. But, while it gives every impression it’s going to ultimately be a comedy, it ain’t.
Wow…we’re all gonna lean into Tom Hanks movies are we? Nothing in Common. Well its not Bachelor Party Hanks thats for sure. Elderly divorce, diabetes, 80’s sex while horses watch. Or was it the other way around?
I know quite a few people who were taken by surprise by “From Dusk til Dawn”
I knew going in it was going to be a vampire flick. Not sure why others didn’t. Perhaps the trailers were misleading?
My sister is a fan of somewhat obscure indie movies, so one year when we got together for Christmas she brought along a DVD of a movie called Raghead for us all to watch. I think I’m remembering the title correctly, because I remember having to explain to my parents that it was a slur directed towards Arabs, but I can’t even find it on IMDB now (There’s a short film listed with that title, but that’s definitely not the movie we watched). Based on the title and the description that it was about an Arab-American teenager, I expected it to be about her facing Islamophobia at school or something along those lines. It was not that at all. The main plot was about a teenage girl discovering her sexuality, getting sexually assaulted by her neighbor, and having a (consensual) sexual relationship with her first boyfriend. The fact that she was of Middle Eastern decent barely had anything to do with it, although her socially conservative overprotective father played into it a bit. And it was set in the early 1990s during the first Iraq War for some reason, so there was some minor sub plot about her being picked on because her father was an Iraqi immigrant. Even my sister, who picked out the movie, agreed that it wasn’t what she expected at all.
On a completely different note (and not technically a movie), the way Fox promoted The Orville I was expecting it to be a stupid comedy that happened to be set in a Star Trek like universe, and thus I didn’t bother watching it until I heard other people talking about how much they liked it. Yeah, it’s not what I expected at all.
Before I saw “Dear Zachary,”, I knew it was about a couple with a child who split up, and a custody dispute.
I was NOT prepared for what eventually happened.
Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories
He’d already made the utterly humorless Interiors, and Manhattan was pretty much a drama, but we thought from the advertising that Stardust Memories would be a return to his “earlier funnier movies” (as several characters said during the film. It wasn’t. Despite some surreal funny moments, this film left most people scratching their heads. It might’ve helped if I’d seen Fellini’s 8 1/2.
Darren Garrison writes:
> I assumed that the American movie was a fairly direct clone, but I pretty much
> stumbled into watching it recently and rather than having his own body change every
> day, he is some sort of mental parasite without a body that jumps into and possesses
> a different body every day.
The movies have no relationship to each other. Every Day was based on a 2012 novel by David Levithan of the same name. It’s a very good book. The movie doesn’t work quite as well. The thing that irritated me about the movie is that, like the book, it’s set entirely in Maryland, except for a little bit in Washington, D.C. I thus watched the movie listening for the characters to talk about the towns that it was set in and was happy that I recognized them all as being in Maryland. The shots didn’t look familiar, but that didn’t bother me. Then I watched the credits. It was shot entirely in Canada. The leading actress was Australian.
This is an oldie, but when I saw the previews for48 Hours, I thought is was a PG 70’s TV show type buddy cop movie. I didn’t realize until I was sitting in the theater what the adjective “action” meant.
Long ago, I found “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads” in the horror section of the video store (told you it was long ago).
Turned out to be one of Spike Lee’s very early films. Good movie, but not at all what I went in expecting (the fact that it opened with “A Spike Lee Joint” at least mitigated the confusion).
I let the shop owner know, and next time I went in it was on the ‘famous directors’ shelf.
I was also caught off-guard by Fight Club. Not as badly, however, as the mom and daughter sitting behind me, who had evidently gone to see 90s-heartthrob Brad Pitt. After it ended, I heard one of them say softly “what was thaaaat?”
Good Night Mommy, a 2014 Austrian horror film. I went to it expecting subtle psychological horror, and I got…BODY HORROR.
I fucking hate body horror.
Funny story about fight club that sorta relates to the thread topic.
I love Fight Club. I watch it about once or twice a year. I figured it was about time to watch it again, and I do have a legal copy, but, back when this happened, I had no working optical drive. So I figured I’d just download a torrent of it. I was pretty drunk and tired so I figured id just start the download and go to bed and watch it after work the next day. Next day comes around and I fire it up…it turns out I downloaded Lesbian Fight Club. It was much much worse, yet I couldn’t not watch it. The fight scenes were…much different.
Woody Allen made a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo, and it looks like a lighthearted rom-com. But there’s nothing light or happy about the ending.
Apparently, Woody considered it a meditation on the power of art. Ah well.
I think Downsizing fits the bill. I only watched it because the trailers looked kind of funny. But the trailers only covered the first 20 minutes of the movie.
But as it turns out, I love this movie. Everything after Matt Damon gets small is awesome to me.