This piece of interview with Roger Corman on Joe Dante’s work on trailers is my fawourite:
“Were there any elements that you had to tell Dante to tone down?
Not really. There was one memorable moment when Joe showed me a trailer for a picture just before lunch. I said, “Joe, it’s alright, but it isn’t quite as exciting as I would like it to be.” He said, “Let me work on it through lunch.” I came back after lunch, and it was exactly the same trailer, trimmed a little bit, with an exploding helicopter. I said, “Joe, that’s an exploding helicopter from a war picture we shot in the Philippines!” He said, “Well, don’t you think it helps the trailer?” It did. It was great. And I thought about it for a little while, and I figured, there’s no law that says every scene in a trailer has to be in the picture. So we left it in. After that, whenever Joe had a dull moment in a trailer, he would add the exploding helicopter.”
I didn’t watch the trailers for it, but Click by Adam Sandler was supposedly marketed as another Adam Sandler comedy but was actually tearjerker drama with a medium heavy sprinkle of comedy.
to each his own I guess. He’s not my favourite actor, not even my favourite comedy actor (that goes to the late Robin Williams). But he makes decent movies, especially his old ones. The new ones, especially if produced by his studio Happy Madison, are formulaic and bland.
One of the best Adam Sandler movies. His usual shit got old fast and it’s one of the few actual well written movies with substance he’s done. Funny people was decent too, mostly cuz he basically plays himself and is a sad clown douchebag in his personal life, which I don’t know if is true but I bought it.
I enjoyed this movie, but was it trying to be a Sci fi flick, a dramatic comedy, or a rom com, or a political commentary on environmentalism, or a political commentary on colonialism… It could have been really amazing if it chose any of those options but instead it was pretty messy, sadly.
The trailer made it look like a funny, interesting sci-fi flick. Instead it went everywhere.
It wasn’t the worst movie I‘ve ever watched but the fact that it tried to do everything all at once was weird. It’s like the writers kept passing along the script to a new team every few pages.
That’s exactly what it felt like. It’s a shame, too, I feel like I would have been into it if it had committed to any one or two or those directions, but it was just a mess.
I feel most might think about things that looked good but sucked, where as I always think about this:
I would have to say Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Based on the trailers and the promotional material, I thought it really was just an old kung fu film brought to a NA audience for the first time or something. I had no interest in it. If not for my brothers wanting to go and my parents forcing me to drive them, I would never have known how God damn hilarious it actually is.
To a lesser extent, the original Austin Powers was the same, but I think it really just took the fact it spawned from a series of SNL skits for granted. I had never seen those skits, and the trailers made it look more like a romantic comedy about a guy who was just infatuated with, but not actually from, the 60’s. I don’t even recall it showing Dr. Evil in the trailers I saw on TV for it. Just some of the interactions between Austin and Vanessa.
Blade runner (the OG one), kangaroo jack (and a very similar trailer I don’t remember with talking dogs?), Toys (maybe not exactly misleading per se, just chaotic as shit? Lots of hype but you had no clue what you were about to watch?), the village…
Definitely more, but most of it goes back far enough that I don’t really remember enough specifics to place the shit.
Godzilla (2014) The trailer showed it as a Godzilla movie starring Bryan Cranston. Instead Cranston only had a brief cameo at the start of the movie and the whole movie was about a couple MUTO creatures, not Godzilla. Godzilla basically only had a couple cameos in the movie. I think most people who didn’t like it just didn’t like being tricked by the trailer.
Amazing no one has mentioned Bridge to Terabithia (2007). The screenwriters disavowed the trailers, iirc. Looks like a cute kids fantasy movie, starts out leaning that way with a middle-school Manic Pixie Dream Girl, then turns hard into being completely real life and extremely tragic. 14-year old me was not prepared.