Cutting together a trailer for a Marvel movie or a Star Wars movie or a Fast & Furious movie is a piece of cake. Just throw in some of the coolest dialogue over some of the most exciting action beats and audiences will line up around the block to see the latest entry in their favorite franchise. But it’s tougher to create trailers for movies that aren’t immediately thrilling.
A cerebral masterpiece like Drive is difficult to market, because its “hero” isn’t exactly a likable or good-hearted person, it’s a car movie that’s light on action, and it’s filled with gruesome violence. In these cases, the editors of the trailers have to get a little creative and can sometimes mislead viewers.
Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a slick neo-noir starring Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver who runs afoul of the mob when he gets involved with his neighbor’s ex-con husband. The movie has one brief car chase and a few incidents of brutal hammer-based vigilante justice, but it’s mostly just shots of brooding Gosling driving through L.A. and flirting with Carey Mulligan.
The editors of Drive’s trailers decided to pull together the various scraps of action to make it look like it was going to be a high-octane actioner akin to the Fast & Furious movies. Suffice to say, a lot of viewers were disappointed.
Frozen (2013)
The first teaser trailer for Disney’s Frozen featured only Olaf and Sven, making it look like a goofy Christmas adventure movie about a bickering snowman and reindeer.
The movie, of course, is an adaptation of The Snow Queen focusing on sisters Anna and Elsa, while Olaf and Sven are just supporting characters.
Man Of Steel (2013)
The trailer for Man of Steel feels like the movie that David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan envisioned before Zack Snyder bungled it. In the trailer, the religious allusions are subtle and the tone feels like a thought-provoking, experimental Malick movie with alien superpowers.
Of course, Snyder’s Man of Steel isn’t subtle at all. The Christian allegories are painfully on-the-nose and the story devolves into a brainless Bayhem-style smash-‘em-up at the first opportunity.
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)
A movie about Jim Carrey hiring an experimental company to remove his ex-girlfriend from his memories might sound like a zany high-concept comedy as opposed to a nuanced Michel Gondry-helmed meditation on romance.
That’s what the marketing team who cut the trailers wanted moviegoers to think, anyway, using clips like Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst dancing in their underwear and Elijah Wood with googly eyes and playing “Mr. Blue Sky” on the soundtrack. These trailers made the movie look a lot more upbeat and fun than it actually is.
Spring Breakers (2012)
The trailers for Harmony Korine’s crime thriller Spring Breakers promised Disney Channel stars in bikinis, James Franco with grills in his teeth, and sexually suggestive gun use.
While the movie did deliver on those fronts, it was a much smarter and well-crafted indictment of modern youth culture than the raunch-fest suggested by the marketing.
Godzilla (2014)
The 2014 remake of Godzilla hit theaters just a few months after Breaking Bad fans were blown away by the acclaimed crime drama’s massively satisfying final season. The trailers put Bryan Cranston in the spotlight, making him look like the lead.
In the actual movie, Cranston’s character is killed off before the monster is even awakened and we’re left with his son Aaron Taylor-Johnson for the rest of the runtime. And we don’t get to see much of Godzilla in the movie, either, so the title’s also misleading.
Observe And Report (2009)
In 2009, two comedies about mall cops were released: one starring Kevin James, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which was suitable for adults and kids, and one starring Seth Rogen, Observe and Report, which isn't exactly children-safe. On paper, the Rogen-starring movie sounds like an R-rated version of Paul Blart, and that’s exactly what the trailers made people think.
The actual movie has been compared to Taxi Driver for its exploration of its lead character’s disturbed psychology. Writer-director Jody Hill never set out to make a crowd-pleasing comedy, but the studio still misled audiences by marketing it as such.
The Grey (2011)
The premise of The Grey – the survivors of a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness have to contend with the local bloodthirsty wolf population – would suggest a typically schlocky Liam Neeson actioner in which he punches wolves instead of Eurotrash. The trailers leaned into this, using the movie’s ambiguous ending to look like a Neeson-v-wolf fight scene.
Joe Carnahan’s movie is a much more contemplative, existential work about a grieving man’s struggle to find a reason to go on living; it’s just told under extreme circumstances in a survival situation.
It Comes At Night (2017)
Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night is a horror movie that doesn’t rely on jump scares, but rather on an unsettling atmosphere and well-rounded characters who can’t trust each other. It’s also startlingly relevant today as a family uneasily mixes households in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
What makes this movie so cerebral and subtle is that it doesn’t focus too much on the virus; it focuses on the two families trying to make it work under one roof. But that wouldn’t make a very exciting trailer, so the marketing team used the movie’s handful of nightmare sequences to make it look like a zombie movie.
Alien 3 (1992)
This might be the most notorious misleading trailer of all time. Alien 3 is technically David Fincher’s directorial debut, but he disowned it after the studio tampered with his vision. Another egregious thing the studio did was putting out a teaser for the Alien threequel with a voiceover that said, “In 1979, we discovered in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.”
Sounds like Alien 3 is going to be set on Earth — not exactly. Bringing the xenomorphs to Earth would’ve been a great way to raise the stakes and shake up the formula. But alas, the movie doesn’t take place anywhere near Earth. It’s set on a distant prison planet.