Many people have done lists like this already, but this
is mine. It’s well known that modern
movie trailers are made to overwhelm you while making the movie look better
than it is, and this often results in disappointment. There are several common elements to the
Misleading Movie Trailer:
1. Music
that’s better than what’s actually in the movie
2. Trailer
hides the stupid stuff that helps ruin the movie
3. Trailer
outright lies about the movies tone, premise, amount of action, or genre
4. Trailer
shows footage/audio that’s not actually in the movie
5. The
Inverse Rule of Comedy Trailers – The funniness of a comedy’s trailer is
usually inversely proportional to the funniness of the comedy
6. Trailer
actually improves the editing in a certain scene
7. Trailer
prominently features cool actor/character who turns out to barely be in the
movie.
And many trailers just look better in general than their
movies. I will note a couple exceptions that didn’t make the list. The trailers for Man of Steel and The Matrix Revolutions might have hid the movies’ flaws, but I thought the two films
delivered on the promised thrills and spectacle and I found them no less fun to
watch than the trailers. Here’s my list
of movies whose trailers made them look better than they were:
23. Clash of the
Titans
2010
D: Louis Leterrier
Wasn’t nearly as fun as the trailer, which mostly looked
good because of some great music.
22. Killing Them
Softly
2012
D: Andrew Dominik
While not a bad movie per
se, the trailer made it look like it would be a lot more fun than it was,
like a crime comedy in the vein of Kiss
Kiss Bang Bang. Unfortunately,
almost all the comic relief in this movie was shown in the trailer, giving the
false impression that it was a comedy.
There’s only one funny moment that wasn’t, but it was very closely tied
in with a moment that was. In Bruges had a similar problem, but
overcame that hurdle better.
21. Smokin’ Aces
2006
D: Joe Carnahan
There were a lot of things I liked about this movie, but
it wasn’t much like the trailers indicated.
It seemed a lot more like an unrestrained action comedy than the movie
ended up being. There was one subplot
not shown in the movie that was annoyingly obvious in its foreshadowing of the
twist. The most irritating thing is that
I wanted to see more of Jason Bateman’s character, but his appearance in the
trailer consists of almost all of his screen time in the movie.
20. The Grey
2011
D: Joe Carnahan
Another movie that’s not really that bad, but not as fun
as the trailer made it look. This
preview practically promises us to see Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face
with broken wine bottles, and it turns out the movie holds out until the last
second and cuts to credits the exact same time the trailer does. It’s kinda funny how this trailer is
misleading for similar reasons as that of Smokin’
Aces, which was made by the same director.
19. Percy Jackon
& the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
2010
D: Chris Columbus
The trailer was more fun to watch than the movie. That one scene where Chiron hands the pen to
Percy was edited in a funnier way than it was in the movie, and I’m pretty sure
that car with the Gatling gun didn’t make the cut. I also wanted to see more of Sean Bean as
Zeus
18. The Lone Ranger
2013
D: Gore Verbinski
Having enjoyed most of Gore Verbinski’s movies up to this
point (including the POTC sequels), I
thought this would be another fun action movie an offbeat sense of humor. The trailer did not indicate just how
poorly-paced, meandering and awkward this movie was. While Tonto looked odd, the trailer gave us
no indication how uncomfortably crazy he was in the movie. It’s funny that that one scene were he says, “Something
very wrong with that horse” occurs immediately
after a poignant moment, causing grotesque tone whiplash.
17. 300
2006
D: Zack Snyder
I have enough problems with this movie, but at least it
would be a guilty pleasure for me if not for all the Two-Gear Diarrhea during
the action scenes (I know, I’m stealing a term from AVGN to describe something
different). The trailer edits the
slow-motion sequences and plays them together, producing a more consistent pace for
the action and making itself more fun to watch than the movie. It also helps that this is set well with Nine
Inch Nails’ “Just Like You Imagined.”
16. Noah
2014
D: Darren Aronofsky
While it had more of a generic, summer blockbuster look
that what I expect from Darren Aronofsky, it still looked like a competent
adaptation of the Biblical story. The trailer conveniently hid the stupid, pretentious and insulting embellishments
of the movie, though.
15. Prometheus
2012
D: Ridley Scott
I knew this movie might be a disappointment since it was
more than a decade since Ridley Scott made a great movie and because it
probably wouldn’t be on the par with the previous Alien movies. While the trailer did reveal that it was clearly part of the series with some implied
retcons, it still makes the movie look far more competent and thrilling than it
was. It’s hard to be thrilled when all
the characters in it aren’t so much people as they are dumb animals. Well, actually animals tend to have decent
survival instincts. They’re more like
plants that have been suddenly granted the power of movement. At least the visuals were very good.
2014
D: Bryan Singer
The trailers were set to excellent music and made the
movie look great, but I thought the movie was overrated.
13. Godzilla
2014
D: Gareth Edwards
The teaser is chilling, well-scored and visually beautiful. I love how they executed the reveal of the
monster at the end. Unfortunately the
movie was dull and blandly competent.
The other trailers made me wish that Bryan Cranston didn’t die too soon
in the movie. They also hid the MUTOs, making Godzilla look like the antagonist. At least it was better
than Godzilla (1998).
12. Iron Man 3
2013
D: Shane Black
Iron Man 3 was
a confused mishmash of good and bad elements, but the trailers, with their excellent
music and the Mandarin’s haunting voice, made it look like s--t was getting
real.
11. Bounty Killer
2013
D: Henry Saine
While I don’t like the manipulative and faddish class
warfare angle, the movie looked like a really fun 80’s-style Mad Max throwback with a campy sense of
humor. This was marred by the needless
overuse of terrible CGI (of which we only see some brief and understandable
examples in the trailer). Also, I was
excited to see Gary Busey, and he was barely in the film.
10. Alien3
1992
D: David Fincher
Not only does the teaser blatantly lie about the movie
taking place on Earth (which was a proposed version of this movie), the trailer
then says “The Bitch is back,” forgetting that the “bitch” is the Alien Queen,
which is nowhere to be found in this movie.
9. Spider-Man 3
2007
D: Sam Raimi
While the trailers did show that it had too many subplots, they still
looked epic. It made us think we’d see
more of Venom with his Venom-face, and it hid the emo-dance from us.
8. Nacho Libre
2006
D: Jared Hess
Starring Jack Black and directed by the guy who did Napoleon Dynamite, this movie should
have been funny. I
only remember one funny part that was that wasn’t in the trailer.
7. X-Men: The Last
Stand
2006
D: Brett Ratner
This trailer was set to excellent music and edited to
make it look like San Francisco was reduced to rubble and an epic battle took
place there. A preview extended that
battle scene to suggest that there were Sentinels in the movie. Too bad it was all just a war room
simulation.
6. Troy
2004
D: Wolfgang Petersen
The nearly infinite mass of ships looked great in the trailer, but it looked silly in the movie.
The film itself was underwhelming and the soundtrack consisted mainly of
that four-note motif that James Horner puts in almost every movie he scores.
5. MIIB
2002
D: Barry Sonnenfeld
The trailers for this movie are hilarious, but they
seemed to have used all the good jokes up for them. The rest of the humor was crude, and the
movie retcons the happy ending of the previous movie just for the sake of a sequel. There were only two moments in this movie
that made me laugh that weren’t in the trailer, and one of them almost doesn’t
count because it was tied in with that retcon.
4. Kick-Ass
2010
D: Matthew Vaughn
While the teaser does feature that terrible Joan Jett
song that Hollywood loves for some reason, it flatters the movie. While I enjoy unrealistically stylized
gunfights as much as the next person, I liked the idea of people attempting to
become super heroes in the real world while being subject to its rules. There’s a delicious absurdity to a realistic
gunfight involving people in colorful capes and masks. Unfortunately, the movie didn’t exactly
deliver on that. The trailer also hid
the disturbing dynamic between Big Daddy and Hit Girl.
3. The Dark Knight
Rises
2012
D: Christopher Nolan
Not only did the trailers mislead us, but the movie was preceded
by two excellent predecessors, making it very disappointing. The teaser made it look like things were
really getting real: Gordon is in a hospital bed looking terrible while
pleading to Batman to return. He looks
like Bane had beaten him so bad that he was out of commission and Batman would
have to continue without his help. We
also see glimpses of Bruce with a cane, which made me think this was
post-back-breaking, which would have made sense. The trailer also flatters this movie while editing
a terrible line read from the movie.
Bane’s inflection of “Mr. Wayne” makes no sense unless it’s the first
thing he says to him.
2. Shoot’em Up
2007
D: Mike Davis
The trailer made this look like a fun action-comedy and
gave no indication whatsoever that this movie was a political screed. Also, the comic relief was far cruder in the
movie.
1. The “Transformers”
Movies
2007, 2009, 2011
D: Michael Bay
I didn’t have my expectations too high for the first, but
I was enraged when I saw it. The
Transformers themselves were reduced to secondary comic relief characters. Bumblebee urinated
on someone, and there was nothing special or novel about this movie other than
its apparent contempt for its source material.
The ad campaign seems to have been tailor-made to mislead fans: they
only used images of Optimus with his face mask up (knowing that his mouth would
off-putting to them) and they even had the gall to use the classic transforming
sound effect even though it wasn’t in the movie! The second one was more of the same. The third movie was dull, but inoffensive (it
was the first one I didn’t actively despise), but the trailer for it wasamazing.
