30 Films That Proved To Be Completely Different From What The Trailer Promised

We managed to get in touch with u/sonofwelk and they kindly agreed to tell us more about the thread they started. 

"My wife and I were killing time during a long drive home and talking about early noughties actors and actresses, and Mena Suvari came up," the Redditor told Bored Panda about the origins of their now-viral post. "I explained to her about this weird film I watched called 'Loser' and she had never heard of it."

"When we got home, I showed her the trailer (because I like to be right, which is not often), however, the trailer was nothing like the film I described to her in the car. "It got me thinking about other films that had been mismarketed and so I posted onto r/movies."

Opening a major motion picture can be a very daunting task. You have to create an internationally recognized brand name that lasts a lifetime and do it in a couple of weeks with no second chances to course-correct.

And with so much money involved, there's no point in making a $100 or $ 200 million dollar movie if no one knows about it. And the execs know it. Spiderman 2, which had a production cost of $200 million, racked up another $75 million in expenses for marketing.

And since we already know that trailers are critical to a film's box office performance, it's no surprise that they sit at the heart of marketing campaigns.

"Trailers are 100% designed for targeted/tailored audiences (remember the first The Jungle Book trailer? It was first released with The Force Awakens and looked like a much darker take than the '67 version)," u/sonofwelk said. "Sometimes it is to cover up how terrible the movie is, for example, Suicide Squad or Battle Los Angeles, and sometimes it's because production companies have no idea how to market the film."

It's true that trailers are, at least in part, shots in the dark. After all, almost all the money the distributor will spend promoting a movie will be committed before it is released.

Because of that, they won't know if they have spent wisely until the movie opens in cinemas and starts collecting money from the paying public.

The lines get blurry when we start talking about manipulation, too. Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo, for example, have admitted to using footage that doesn't make it into the final cut of their films in their trailers to "preserve the surprise of the narrative."

“We talked about all scales of marketing,” Joe Russo said. “The thing that’s most important to us is that we preserve the surprise of the narrative. When I was a kid and saw The Empire Strikes Back at 11 am on the day it opened… It so profoundly moved me because I didn’t know a damn thing about the story I was going to watch. We’re trying to replicate that experience.”

Joe explained how he and Anthony “use all the material that we have at our disposal to create a trailer. We look at the trailer as a very different experience than the movie, and I think audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what’s gonna happen in the film.”

In part, u/sonofwelk agrees. "A great movie trailer tells you nothing, but it stays with you long past the 2-minute run time," the Redditor and movie enthusiast said. "I remember how excited I was by Battle Los Angeles — the haunting music, the grainy news footage, the fact that we knew next to nothing about the plot. Turned out to be a right pile of bollocks."

"Another great trailer for a mediocre film was Man of Steel with the voice of Zod over the top. I think it would be cheating to have any film trailer by Nolan on this list," u/sonofwelk added, highlighting that at the end of the day, the movie has to deliver, no matter how exciting the trailer was.