It might sound entirely dishonest, but misleading the public when it comes to movie trailers apparently isn’t illegal but it does manage to irk a few people now and again since it is kind of problematic. What it does is essentially show people something that they might get good and excited about, only to find out that what they were hoping for might amount to a couple of scenes in the movie overall, or be entirely misleading since it was a hook to get them interested. In some cases, this can be a positive thing, since it could lead to a person watching a movie that they might not have noticed in the first place. But a lot of times it’s an annoyance since it involves tricking people into watching something in the hopes that they’ll be rewarded for their patience, only to realize that in some cases the movie is more or less a bust and doesn’t really represent what they were hoping for in the first place. In some ways, this might feel like a lot of nitpicking, since realistically it’s not too hard to research a movie and figure out just what it’s supposed to be about. But when the average attention span of the average moviegoer is measured in seconds instead of minutes, it’s usually a good idea to keep things simple and honest.
Here are a few of the most misleading movie trailers.
5. Legally Blonde
There are a few things wrong with this trailer and the movie to start with. It’s very possible for a salon worker to be intelligent, so there’s no issue there. But acting as though a person can raise their LSAT scores in a record-setting period of time, and acting like Harvard isn’t hard to get into, are slaps in the fact to those that work hard for such achievements that the movie might have been better off leaving out. This has nothing to do with having a thin skin, but it has everything to do with being realistic since the odds of a person up and deciding to go to law school and being a prodigy that can walk right through it are astronomical, to say the least. A hard-won success story is what this was touted as when in truth it was a pretty girl conning her way into Harvard and a better life to spite the jerk that dumped her.
4. American Ultra
It really appears that this movie was trying to find its identity throughout the trailer and throughout its entire length since it never fully settled on one aspect or another. Was it meant to be funny, was it meant to be exciting? What it feels like is that the movie was set on a teeter-totter and never quite hit that balance point since it kept going one way or the other. The story wasn’t terrible really, but it simply couldn’t stick to its own narrative and in the process became a giant mess of something that could have been sorted out quite easily had the director decided to make an action movie with funny moments or a funny movie with several action scenes.
3. Rambo
Rambo’s been a one-man wrecking crew in the past, right? The build-up in this trailer made it feel as though he’d be heading into the jungle once again to do what he does best, at least a first. But as anyone who watched the movie found out the movie was not only surprisingly gritty and extremely gory, which wasn’t too horrible to bear, but Rambo had a lot of help along the way as well. It’s funny to think however that because he’s such a badass that there’s no other warrior in the world that could possibly come close to being as great as he is, as though he’s become the Steven Seagal of his own movies.
2. The Cable Guy
A lot of people felt that this was going to be another laugh riot going into the theater, but as memory serves, a lot of people came out wondering just what in the hell they’d seen and why they felt so conflicted about it. The Cable Guy was not one of Jim Carrey’s better movies, largely because the character he played wasn’t someone that a lot of people would want to associate with in the first place. Ace Ventura, Truman, the Mask, those were guys that people could see themselves getting along with. This guy though was just a stalking incident waiting to happen and made a lot of people uncomfortable, to say the least.
1. Bridge to Terabithia
Some people groaned some people were excited, and some didn’t really care one way or the other since it looked like another fantasy movie that had to do with kids. That wasn’t horrible really, as it could have been a lot of fun. But that wasn’t what the movie was about, and a lot of people were kind of stunned that the best stuff from the trailers didn’t come until near the end of the movie. That’s when dishonesty in marketing is kind of a pain.
Anything that can be used as a hook appears to be fair game.
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