I was thinking about this the other day when I was watching “Castaway.” That’s probably the one the stands out for me.
I really wanted to see the movie when it first came out and remember being super-pissed when the trailer revealed that he made it off the island.
I went in still hoping that maybe what they showed in the trailer was some sort of dream sequence, but that turned out, of course, not to be case.
So what trailers have spoiled the movie for you?
Ah, that’s number two on this list, which I found on Google trying to remember one. It’s hard for me to remember, but I know it’s probably happened.
There’s a current thread on Paranormal Activity in which many posters (including myself) have noted that the trailer gives most of the movie’s few, but well-placed, jump moments away. You don’t know when they’re going to happen while watching the movie, but you know that they will happen – which significantly decreases their value.
The trailer for The Departed shows Mark Wahlberg’s character firing a gun at the point of view of the camera – a shot that stuck in my mind for some reason (maybe because it reminded me of Brock Landers in Angels Live in My Town). His character in The Departed was supposedly neutralized relatively early on; when the finale came, I knew that Wahlberg’s character would be heavily involved.
I saw the trailer for “Brothers” last week. Not a single plot twist was left unrevealed. Every possible question you could have had about the scenario (a soldier goes off to war while his wife, their children, and his brother hang out together back home) is answered. I believe watching that trailer rendered seeing the movie completely superfluous.
Not the trailer, the trailer was fine, but the picture on the DVD box spoiled Hancock for me. Was that also the movie poster?
I still enjoyed the movie (schizo as it was – is it comedy or drama?) but the element of surprise when a character was revealed was gone.
The new upcoming rom-com Did You Hear About the Morgans? with Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant.
The entire setup, resulting situation, and conclusion are completely given away in the trailer. NewYork estranged yuppie couple who can’t stand eachother. They witness a friend being murdered and are put into a witness relocation program in rural Wyoming. (Fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue). They find their true selves, they find eachother again. (Awwww) The End.
The trailer for Snakes on a Plane didn’t ruin it as much as the title itself.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing significant in the movie Swimfan that’s not in the trailer. Watch it, and tell me that’s not the entire movie, from start to finish.
Most trailers spoil a movie for me. I hate that they give away so much information, usually every funny line, and except in rare cases, every plot twist. It didn’t used to be this way. When Alien came out, the ads gave you pretty much no idea whatsoever what kind of movie it was.
Behind Enemy Lines was the first movie that I remember really feeling like there was no point at all in watching the movie after the trailer encapsulated every plot twist.
I remember the trailer for “Snake Eyes” giving away the villain & twist ending. I think Roger Ebert even wrote a column about it at the time.
I was kinda disappointed that the cool World Trade Center-and-helicopter scene wasn’t in Spider-Man…
Going back a few years, the preview (that’s what we called them then ) for the original Psycho featured Alfred Hitchcock walking around the motel set of the movie saying something like “The villain in this movie managed a motel. In his spare time he had an unusual hobby, he stuffed animals. Then one day” pointing at the chair the villain’s mother sat in “he stuffed something unusual, something he shouldn’t have.” After that there was nothing surprising about the movie’s ending!
All the trailers for Mission: Impossible showed the scene with the helicopter in the tunnel blowing up and propelling Tom Cruise forward to the train. When I was watching the movie in the theater I thought, “Wait–that’s it? That’s going to be the ultimate scene in this movie? I’ve already seen that a hundred times on television!” It made the climax very anticlimactic.
I’ve said this one before – the trailer for Cops and Robbers 9from back in the 1970s) had scenes from throughout the film, including the climactic shot. If you watched the trailer, there really wasn’t any reason to watch the actual movie – you got the entire plot laid out in about 3 minutes, and knew how it ended.
I really hate it when the trailer includes scenes that essentially give away key plot points, like showing the action continuing on after the action seems to be over, or show a character who should be dead i a scene you haven’t seen yet. This is the kind of thing that onl shows up when you’re watching the film, think it’s almost over, and realize that – “Hey, I haven’t seen that wshot I saw in the trailer.” This happned with, for instance, American Dreamer, where the trailer showed scenes that didn’t happen until after the “false ending”. Some movies, like Terminator 2, didn’t even try to hide the surprise – I doubt if anyone who saw the film didn’t realize that Arnold was a “good” Terminator before they went in, although they played it as if you wouldn’t be aware of this.
To be fair, though, they revealed that one pretty early in the movie, so it’s not like they were giving away some twist ending.
Of course the worst examples of this are not really in previews (or “trailers” if you prefer) but the movies themselves.
The plot of The Maltese Falcon (the Humphrey Bogart version) revolves around the search for the statue of the falcon with the mystery of why so many people want it being explained only in one of the last scenes. That is if you haven’t watched the movie from the beginning because the movie opens up with an entirely unnecessary, pointless, and mystery-destroying prologue which describes what the falcon is and why it is valuable. I’ll never understand why it was put in the movie. On those rare occasions when I encounter someone is seeing the movie for the first time, I tell him or her “Close your eyes until I say it is safe open them.”
The same thing occurs in Dark City.
The relatively crummy Sum of All Fears could’ve been at least partially less crummy if they hid the fact that the terrorist nuke actually goes off, and saved it as a twist instead of revealing it in the trailer.
Someday I’ll make a movie with a false spoiler in the trailer. That’ll throw 'em.
I can’t really think of any trailers that have actively spoiled a movie for me, but it does bother me when some of the footage I see in the trailers aren’t actually in the movie. The most recent example of this was District 9, where they show one of the aliens being interviewed. That footage was not in the final cut in the film. It also happened to be one of the scenes I most wanted to see. :mad:
On the commentary track for T2, James Cameron makes it clear he wasn’t too happy about it being revealed in the trailers.
Some people felt the trailer for The Sixth Sense spoiled not the ending, but the early portion of the film by famously revealing that the Haley Joel Osmet character “see[s] dead people”. It didn’t bother me while watching the movie, but I can see how the early part of the film may have been more interesting if there had been a real mystery about what was bothering the young boy. On the other hand, I don’t know how the film could have been promoted properly without revealing this plot point. The “I see dead people” trailer certainly got people’s interest, and it gave a better idea of what kind of movie The Sixth Sense was than if it had been portrayed as a movie about a boy who’s mentally ill…OR IS HE?
I think this is more a flaw with the movie than with the trailer, but I felt The Truman Show dragged out the opening “what’s going on here?” sequence way too long. We all knew Jim Carrey’s life was a TV show. That’s the whole premise of the movie.
I remember reading that the narration at the beginning of Dark City was not in the shooting script and was added during post-production because someone high up felt that people wouldn’t understand the movie without it. Something similar may have been the case with The Maltese Falcon.