The trailer for Wonder Boys made it look asinine. I wouldn’t have bothered to see it had it not been for Ebert’s glowing review. It turned out to be one of my favorite movies.
I’ve been struck dumb by the trailer for The Crocodile Hunter. It starts out just stupid, the “Hey, look, a Crocodile Hunter movie” effect. And then it’s so profoundly edited, it defies all laws of possibility by getting stupider and stupider with every scene. It’s like a fibonacci sequence of idiocy.
Clearly you weren’t paying nearly enough attention to her tits.
That’s the best description I’ve heard in a while 
Gives away everything: 13F. An ok little Sci-Fi movie about a research team creating a simulated world with sentient inhabitants. The trailer seemed intriguing until one of the researchers stands up and shouts (from memory)
“This world is all just another simulation and we’re elements of somebody else’s research project!” Thus giving away the movie’s twist.
Is nothing like the movie: Falling Down. Trailer: Everyday average guy is finally pushed too far and starts getting even with all those people who make all our lives just a little more miserable each and every day.
The movie: A wife-beating, child-abusing control freak who’s been living with (and terrorizing) his mother while pretending to go work every day goes on a rampage across L.A., which he plans to finish by killing his ex-wife, his daughter and himself.
Have you ever seen the original Star Wars trailer? You may be able to find it on cinescape.com, but it’s gone belly-up, so who knows?
Just the words Star Wars coming at you (not in the yellow font) cut with scenes and a voice over and drum sounds. It starts with “Somewhere in the universe, this could be happening right now”.
Little did we know…
Not exactly “worst trailer EVER” material, but I really hate it when trailers rip off the soundtrack from other movies. Look, I realize you need some music, but it’s incredibly distracting to be playing the climactic theme of Braveheart or Gladiator to a movie that is nothing like either of those. (K-19 is one of at least three that are floating around with music from Gladiator – I know once I sat through two trailers in a row that used the same musicfrom Gladiator.)
One of the worst trailers I’ve seen lately was the Star Wars: Episode II trailer that focused on Padme and Anakin’s relationship. For people who didn’t know there were multiple trailers, it really just confused them.
I found the trailer for the Tom Cruise flick Jerry Maguire to be completely off-point.
The trailer concentrated on the whole Show me the money! mantra, and seemed to involve a greedy sports figure and his venal agent. Just my favorite topics. I haven’t seen the movie – Tom Cruise pictures are not a must-see for me – but apparently it was deeper than that.
I gotta agree that this one is pretty bad. I saw it in January of 1977, waiting for Network to start. Brooding, non-John Williams muisic, solid blue lettering rather than the distinctive yellow outline that they eventually settled on. Scenes chosen apparently at random, so you had no idea what kind of movie it was going to be. And somehow thety managed to make it all look dull and overcast. If I only had this to go by, I’d never have seen the movie.
originally posted by Cat Fight
The canonical example of this was a dinosaur flick from the mid-'80s called BABY: The Secret of the Lost Legend. The whole theater cracked up when the title appeared.
The worst trailers I remember (I’m sure there are more that I’ve managed to block out):
Singles. Generic Generation X angst, bad music, but it was attached to every goddamn movie that opened in 1992. After I’d seen that trailer four or five times, when it started again I’d just walk out of the auditorium until it was over.
Daredevil. Darkness, more bad music, some guy in a funny costume squatting on a ledge, no dialogue, no explanation. I’m apparently supposed to know who this clown is??
Austin Powers 3. Bad '60s music, a parade of dancing midgets. Kill me now.
Any trailer for a “moron movie”: incessant scatological humor, animals always involved, usually featuring Adam Sandler or Chris Kattan.
Anything featuring a strobe light or cutting between scenes every two seconds. MY EYES!!
Well, I will put the trailer for Fight Club in the Trailers That Misrepresent The Movie. I think that most people who saw the trailer (who hadn’t read the book, that is) were thinking: A group of guys fighting each other for two hours, this ain’t gonna be any good!
I mean, the movie is one of the best movies I have ever seen, but the trailer just made it seem like another dumb Hollywood movie.
Come to think of it, Gladiator was advertised using music from Conan the Barbarian. It’s like the Circle of Life.
I guess they’re playing to the existing fanbase for the comic book, but you’re right – DD isn’t nearly as well-known as Spiderman or Batman, so they need to get the attention of the mainstream audience.
When I saw this trailer, there was complete silence in the theater. Not a single laugh. I guess it was supposed to be hilarious to redo the opening scene from the first Austin Powers movie, but with midgets. Maybe when you have a funny movie that’s a take-off on the spy genre, and then only a few years later you’re doing take-offs of your own movie, it’s time to quit.
I’ll bet the thinking behind the Austin Powers 3 trailer went something like this:
1 midget = funny!
50 midgets = 50 times the funny!
There’s a great sketch in MadTV (or maybe SNL) about horrible movie trailers. A bunch of people are trapped in a theatre and forced to watch trailer after trailer, with every second one being for a wacky comedy starting with a bit of voice over and then that James Brown “Whoa! I feel good! buh-uh buh-uh buh-uh-uh”
That was a teaser. The point was to make people interested in learning more. It is to whet the appetite to see the movie.
I absolutely hated the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode 2: AOTC. (It’s the one with the fade-in, fade-out scenes and the heavy Darth Vader breathing, titled, appropriately enough, “Breathing”.) Whoever made it thought moviegoers and SW fans would be sufficiently tickled by a handful of five-second-long silent scenes. Gimme a break. After making them wait three frickin’ years for a sign of the next movie, you owe it to your fans to produce something a little more substantial.
Within weeks, they came out with two longer trailers that actually had dialogue and sounds from the movie. It made me wonder why they ever bothered making and running the teaser in the first place.
Tell you everything variety:
I remember the trailer for Bubble Boy being especially annoying. You could tell they had greenlighted the film based on the title before one page of the script was written.
How many contrived, wacky situations can we put this putz (that you’re supposed to root for) in. He’s in a bubble, so it’s funny, dammit! We’ll tack a standard “underdog hero must save the girl he loves from marrying the wrong guy so he takes a wild road trip” story onto it. But he’s in a bubble, so it’s funny, dammit! Nevermind if the bubble broke he’d die a horrible death from all the falls or infections due to his condition that puts him in the bubble in the first place. He’s in a bubble so it’s funny, dammit!
Tell you zilch, but fail to arouse curiosity:
A recent one, that Pluto Nash thing with Eddie Murphy. I’ve seen the trailer about four times now, I can tell Eddie Murphy’s in it, and it’s set in a wacky kind of outer space setting, and…that’s about it. No idea of plot, or any gags that really stand out (I barely remember Murphy complaining about going to Earth since it smells bad), or who else is in it. Lots of quick edits to show me they spent a lot of money on effects. Yawn
Misrepresent the movie:
No Man’s Land, the great flick about the war in Bosnia. The trailer set it up like it was an upbeat tale of two guys, from opposing sides, thrown together by the misfortunes of war. The film is much darker (and better) than that. Yes, there are funny moments, but the trailer made the film appear much less serious and meaningful than it is.
People seem to not really grasp the difference between trailer and teaser.
I have to defend the Strange Days “Pitch” trailer. I thought that was the neatest thing when I saw it. It established the premise and themes of the movie perfectly, so I don’t know what Elvis Rojo meant. It was that characters sales pitch from the movie to a guy who wanted to try the ‘squid’. Since he was addressing the audeince it basicly said “This is the world of this movie.”
It was great because it was a unique trailer.
CATFIGHT- That was an SNL skit (MadTV prays they could do anything close to that good.) In the sketch there is one guy (Tracy Morgan) who loves every single one of these horrible trailers. At the end after having been stuck in the theater for several days they discover that he has eaten his own arms.
Supernova the 2000 movie with James SPader, Lou Diamond Phillips and Angela Bassett. The film itself was such an atrocity that it went through two directors and had to settle on the fake credit of “Thomas Lee” because even the second director didn’t want to be associated with it. The Trailer was the worst I’ve seen. It ran in the theatre and my frined and I turned to eachother and said in sort-of-union “someone got fired for that trailer/that trailer just ended someone’s career!”
I’ll second that vote!
I missed this fantastic film in the theaters because of a crapulent Trailer.
“Hmmm… Brad Pitt and Ed Norton beating the crap out of eachother, then showering. I think I’ll pass.”
The real bummer is that on the DVD there is an amazing ‘Internet Trailer’ that captures the spirit of the film very well and would have had me standing in line on opening day for it.
=(