I’m talking about the marketing aspects that have utterly failed. What preview made you so apathetic and uninterested you wouldn’t have seen it under any circumstances?
My all time pick would have to be the trailer for The Last Days of Chez Nous. Just awful. I still won’t watch the video on principle.
I also remember the previews for The Wood were excruciatingly bland.
I hate kidnapping movies, so anything like the Mel Gibson one Ransom(?) just disgusts me.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
By all accounts I’ve heard it’s a pretty interesting movie (aside from Ben Affleck and Kevin Smith ribbings), but I’ll never know cause I don’t care to watch it. The trailer made it look like the most boring movie ever made. It didn’t help that this was a “prestige” picture so they let the trailer last a good five minutes longer than the others. It also didn’t help that the trailer played before every single movie I went to that winter.
Ever had the feeling that Hollywood is mocking you?
Strange Days had one of the worst trailers ever. People complain about trailers giving away too much of the movie, but the trailer for this GREAT Film said nothing. It was just a close up of Ray Fines in front of a white background talking about how he was the “Magic Man” and could make your dreams come true, but that was it. No plot, no character identification, nothing.
I like the current television trailers for the new Jet Li movie, The One because they, too, deliver nothing about the plot. The trailer before the movie talks about how it’s an evil Jet traveling to other dimensions to kill alternate versions of himself to make him stronger/faster/invincible, and how on his current trip, his alternate ego is a cop, so it’s a Jet v. Jet movie, but the TV trailers just say “He’s fast, he’s strong, see him hit people with a police motorcicle” and that’s it. For some reason, the TV trailers make the movie a lot more interesting.
As I’ve mentioned in another thread, the trailer for the 1970s movie Cops and Robbers told the whole damned story! After you saw the trailer there was no need to see the movie at all – it was like the “Cliff’s Notes” version of the film. They even showed the climax of the film!
Van Damme movies
They dont do it anymore since it has become so cliche (thank god) but always inserting a way to use his name DROVE ME INSANE. “Van Damage” is still one that drive the nail inbetween the eyes.
Seagal also, every trailer had him saying some cool line in the face of the enemy “think yer a tough guy?” etc etc. It got hilarious as he porked out. I would have paid good money to hear this exchange
“Think yer a tough guy?”
“No, think yer a thin guy, chubby?”
I might get flamed for this, but one of the worst one I’ve seen is the one for The Rocky Horror Picture Show*. Basically it only says : “We have a movie, it has weird people in it, oh yeah, and they sing and dance too”. Based on that I wouldn’t have gone and seen the movie.
[sub]* I’ve seen the two trailers on my copie of RHPS, so I like the movie, just the trailers[/sub]
I didn’t recall seeing in the theaters, but having recently seen the Ghostbusters trailer on DVD, I have to say it was a limp and uninteresting piece of celluloid crud.
Good thing I didn’t see that way back when, or else I might have avoided the movie all together! 
Clay Pigeons. A good movie, but if you only saw the preview it looked like it was a goofy supposely funny movie… nothing to do with it.
I did not want to go see it at all and my husband rented the tape. I enjoyed it and remember saying, I can’t believe the trailor was so bad, if I had known what kind of movie it was (intersting plot), I would have gone in the movie theater…
Sacrilege-- but the original trailer for Star Wars was awful! It has this non-John Williams, brooding music. They apparently hadn’t yet come up with the distinctive outlined-in-yellow Star Wars logo, and they managed to make the movie look dumb!
I just got the Godfather trilogy DVDs, and let me just say that I’m glad I saw the first movie before I watched the trailer for it. The trailer gave away every piece of the plotline! Not only that, but it was mindnumbingly boring and long. If I saw the trailer in theatres today, it wouldn’t be a movie I would want to see.
The worst is definitely the upcoming Shallow Hal. What, fat is ugly?? Oh please!!!
The thing is, I suspect that the trailer is a good one, in that it accurately says what the movie is really like. And in this case, it looks to be THE most hypocritical pieces of tripe to come out of the Farrelley Bros., which is saying a lot. The premise is that this guy is really shallow for going on appearances instead of appreciating a woman’s inner beauty – and then the whole movie is a sequence of fat jokes? What the hell?
Anyway, speaking of movies I’m never ever going to see ever, the trailer for Rat Race did a good job of keeping me miles away from any theater showing it, but I’ve heard from more than a few people that it was actually pretty funny.
At least the trailer guys have toned down a little on the “In a World…” opening. You still hear it every once in a while, but it’s nowhere near the epidemic proportions it was getting to be.
Titan A.E.'s trailer was so bad it was uncomfortable. When I actually saw the movie, though, the trailer had lowered my expectations to the point that I actually enjoyed the movie.
The trailer for JACOB THE LIAR convinced me never, ever to watch even a frame of that film.
By the way, the RAT RACE trailer almost made me avoid the movie, but when I saw it, it turned out to be a great comedy.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
About Shallow Hal, what gets me is the extreme undesirability of the male protagonist. I’ve seen him in too many movies playing a drunken slob.
I’ve been wondering if in the movie he sees some women as ugly that other guys see as beautiful, or if he just sees all women as beautiful. And if he’s supposedly going on their inner beauty, then why would he have any initial opinion of them at all, if he doesn’t know what they’re really like? Or is it magic rather than hypnotism?
I saw a trailer today for a movie about a military pilot who wants more excitement, and then gets it…which is where I would have stopped the trailer, personally. But no, they tell the entire plot of the whole @#$%ing movie in the trailer. I feel I’ve seen it.
I don’t even read the whole blurb on the back of a paperback book, 'cause I feel they give away too much info. I read the first line or two to have some remote idea of what the book is about.
When I was adolescent and the first Alien movie came out, I was really annoyed with it because it gave no hint of what the movie was. My friend dragged me to it–I was sure it would be super boring–and it was great!
The trailer for Baseketball was pretty awful. Once I saw the movie, I was surprised that it was quite funny (well, the first 2/3 of it anyway). It also became clear why the trailer was so bad; most of the jokes in the movie simply weren’t suitable to be shown in a trailer.
I hear it’s hypnotism – he gets hypnotized into thinking that a woman’s exterior is a relection of her inner beauty, so if she’s “got a great personality,” he thinks she’s a bombshell. Dunno what happens when he first meets someone, but supposedly Gwenyth Paltrow(sp?) looks sexy to him because he hears about the various charity work she does.
Still not gonna bother to see the movie, though. Gotta go see Monsters Inc. first…
The trailers for A.I. were terrible…could barely tell what the film was about, and it sure looked boring. Of course, it ended up being a pretty accurate reflection of the film 
ANY mainstream Hollywood comedy trailer gives away almost all of the best jokes, so pretty much all of them fall into the bad category.
Guess I can’t come up w/ a ‘worst’ one off top of my head right now…
I can’t recall any other comedy movie that didn’t have a funny joke in the trailer. Even Bubble Boy made me giggle when he got hit by that bus.
Marc