The marketing makes it seem like the movie is about Austin (the unbreakable boy) who is autistic, but rather it's about his prick of a father who caused a drunk driving accident
The talking kangaroo was included in all of the trailers and the main poster but was only a hallucination and was seen for like 30 seconds (Kangaroo Jack)
FUN FACT: Kangaroo Jack used to be a 18+ film called Down and Under, and test audiences HATED it. So they had to scramble to attract audiences, and they realized they had wacky kangaroos in that dream sequence, so after a lot of editing and false advertising we got Kangaroo Jack
The stuff they left in while maintaining a PG rating is kind of fucked up. Binge drinking, boobie-grabbing, jokes about epilepsy and getting whacked, Michael Shannon growling "You pansy-ass (r-slur)s are dead!"
Wasn’t “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?“ also PG? The baby character was pretty crude (cigars, upskirting women, the middle finger) and then there’s Jessica and her introduction.
I hated that movie as a kid. It made me realize trailers are a good way to lie and not for the audience to understand the movie, but to just sell tickets no matter what.
As a big fan of the book, the marketing utterly baffled me. I knew that the fantasy sequences were completely stuff the two main characters made up to cope with their dreary childhoods, but if you hadn’t read the book those scene came off wildly different in the ads.
Neverwas was like this for me as a kid. The whole family was expecting Spiderwick or Narnia but a little more serious/adult like Dragonheart.
Turned out to be a movie like Bridge to Terabithia, with even less CGI and the twist was that the old man had just confused fantasy and reality in his old age. Im sure it was decent, but wasn't the movie I was expecting.
Yes, but it being a mundane movie about childhood friendship and the struggles of growing up is not giving away the eventual twist.
So they could have been honest about that.
I saw this as a kid, and after we got home from seeing it, we learned that one of my paternal grandparents died. After seeing a movie where a girl drowns.
The famous Dead Island trailer that showed a family on holiday being torn apart by zombies with the whole trailer being in reverse which set the tone for the game being a very gritty and serious story. And then what actually came out was a lot more lighthearted and jokey (this was apparently because they’d hired a separate company to make the trailer without giving them too much detail on the game’s actual tone)
Thing is, you absolutely find traces of tragedies around the game. Story-corpses and notes and letters tell grim stories on the island and I loved that. But also the protagonists were goofballs. Both aspects worked for me really well together and I loved the game back in the day. I had a lot of fun with the sequel too (not riptide, the real one).
One thing that stuck with me is an early game encounter with a survivor in a pool, filled with blood, talking about how he had to kill his family because they would not stop trying to attack him. Guy is devastated
He’s screaming at you about how you’d have done it too, trying to rationalise a situation he had no control over as a mental defense mechanism that clearly isn’t working. To make matters worse, you can’t help him. He’s got to get through it on his own.
Ye I do genuinely like the tone Dead Island has. How while it is fairly goofy, you still find bits and pieces that remind you that this is a fucking zombie outbreak and people are losing their loved ones
Not to mention the contrast and haunting visuals of a resort where people were having fun just turned into a world frozen in time from when the panic started. You can see trails of abandoned luggage and blood smeared on the ground from people being dragged away. You can even find a guy in a pool of blood crying about how he just had to kill his entire family after they turned. Beyond that, you can see that Banoi isn’t as prosperous as it looked from the resort, mirroring how Hawaii’s tourist front is a sham, with the real Hawaii being devastated by colonialism.
I think the room next door to the one you wake up into, in the game, is the family's room. You can see damages and blood traces matching the event seen in the trailer.
I don't think that saying it was being run in reverse is the most accurate. Half the trailer were segments in reverse and the other half was going forward. So they meet in the middle.
i saw this trailer as a kid and it scared the shit out of me, gave me nightmares and i spent the whole summer sad and terrified from anxiety about a zombie outbreak 10/10
Back in the days of video stores, 8 year old me picked up this DVD because the back of the box described it as a film where animals build their own farm. It said the movie would "leave the whole family squealing with delight."
I ended up learning that they used to make glue out of horses.
PS: I found it. The back of the box makes Animal Farm sound like a feel-good family comedy, but the actual movie follows the gruesome events of the book fairly closely, including the part where they display Old Major's rotted skull on a pike.
That sounds more like a description of Walter Brooks' Freddy the Pig books. These are about talking animals who live in harmony with the human farmer. There's no mention of what usually happens to domesticated pigs on farms. But since the intelligent, resourceful Freddy keeps getting involved in various interesting and potentially lucrative activities like learning magic tricks and becoming a detective, it's easy enough to see why Farmer Bean is willing to keep him around, if only for entertainment purposes, even without prompting from unusually literate spiders.
Unfortunately no movies seem to have been made based on this series, which was published starting in the late 1920's.
I remember I mentioned reading this book in high school and the class asshole started laughing at me for reading kids' books about little animals who are friends and shit.
I mean...an anti Stalinism book being made into a film during the start of the Cold War...yeah, I'm sure it was CIA backed and probably did more damage to communism than the Bay of Pigs ever did.
I remember renting this at my local grocery store and thought it was a sequel to Babe. It's on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5JgD8AhRjs&t=24s if you ever want to open those old wounds lol Also the intro soundtrack is still so good.
I did actually open those old wounds a couple years ago, since I'm a middle/high school English teacher now and I teach Animal Farm. I wanted to know which adaptation to show my students, so I rewatched it along with the 1950's animated one.
The voice cast and music are excellent, and the visuals once Napoleon has taken over are extremely creepy. It's a decent adaptation imo, just not one that's appropriate to market like it's a Muppet movie.
For those who dont know, the main characters are the little guys in the corner running after the shopping cart
It is one of the ugliest animated films to ever hit theaters, it is dogshit, and it was all made to be a giant ad for a few dozen groccery store products.
It also stars Charlie Sheen as the main character, and was in development hell for around a decade after hard drives containing most of its 3D assets were stolen in 2002.
By 2011, the producers defaulted on a loan, and the unfinished film was auctioned off to its insurer, which finished and released the film as quickly and cheaply as possible to recuperate its losses as best it could, which is why it looks like that.
Against a budget of $45–65 million, it grossed $120,323.
And the originals were destroyed in an incident of "corporate terrorism", and the original creator had to spend years ostensibly animating it entirely from scratch on his own to fulfil contractual obligations (production started in 1997 and release was in 2012)
Advertised as a funny movie about shrink ray technology, seemed like it was going to be a "Honey I shrunk the Town" type of situation.
Nah, ended up being a drama mostly about weath inequality and climate change for some reason, to the point where the premise of the characters being really small basically had no effect on the plot except for a few jokes about things being bigger than you would expect.
This is one of the worst movies I ever saw because of this. I was really excited for it because the trailers made the movie seem so cool! Then it got into the economy and poor families and immigrants having to deal with bad conditions and it pissed me off. It didn't make me feel bad for people in these situations, it just pissed me off that a cool concept was pissed away. And then it gets into environmentalism and it's so stupid! Fuck this movie!
Frankenstein's Dog - Goosebumps: Most Wanted series. This pissed me off SO BAD as a kid because just looking at the freaky-ass cover art, you think its going to be about a monster dog made of stitched up body parts. But its NOT - its about Robots! I don't want read about freaking robots, I want zombie monster dog! Why would you LIE to me RL Stine! WHY?!
The cover for Camp Jellyjam scared tons of kids back in the day, but this weird creepy guy isn't anywhere in the book. Instead the main villain is some Jabba the Hut-like jelly monster.
Yes he is. He's the camp counselor, there's even a part where the main character accidentally hits him in the chest with a bat and notes how weird it is he didn't react.
The only scene from this movie that I can remember vividly is a single scene where main characters talking about something and in the background you see a girl giving some birds bread and a compi is amongst the flock pigeons. If we just got a film that was a documentary style movie about dinosaurs in our world, it would’ve been arguably one of the best Jurassic Park movies
This is where I lost all interest in watching the Jurassic movies, still love the franchise but have no interest in watching anymore movies that come out
The problem is that I don't know where the franchise can go from there. They've already done the "dinos on earth plot" and closed it off, and now all the dinosaurs are mostly dead. What is the next plot?
I am still of the opinion that after the first Jurassic World they should have gone down a Planet of the Apes route.
Alongside the dinosaurs an ancient virus DNA-strain was accidentally also resurrected (this was an idea once brought up in the videogames). The dinosaurs are immune to it since it’s from their time but modern mammals, including humans, aren’t and so it leads to a mass pandemic. Each sequel we see civilization collapse more and more while the dinosaurs are spreading out into the emptied space, until it inevitably becomes their planet again.
Yeah i wonderd if they wanted this movie to fail, i mean dinosaurs rampaging across nature would have been an awesome movie, why did they even decide on the locust thing
https://giphy.com/gifs/WLk8YgE2N4mB2
Chappie was marketed as a sci-fi action movie about a robot who becomes self aware. What the trailers didn’t say was that he gets taken in by the South African rap group Die Antwoord who teach him to be a gangster
Yeah this movie was weird. I remember getting this feeling of “eugh” at the way he referred to them as mommy and daddy and their accents and mannerisms were just so bizarre
Marketed as Fast and the Furious, actually a superhero film with realistic, tragic consequences.
The elevator scene is one of the best things I've watched. That clear delusion of "I'm the hero" while simultaneously being just as scary as the villains.
For those who don’t know, the marketing for Halo 5 was that Master Chief has gone rouge, is implied to have attacked UNSC personnel, and you are following new character ONI agent Locke in tracking him down ending in a confrontation in which one of them is killed. One of the biggest aspects of this marketing campaign was Hunt the Truth, an ARG centered around an in-universe reporter trying to figure out who Chief is, and it’s made to make us think that the story of Halo 5 is about trying to figure out why he went rogue
When the game came out, it’s revealed in like the 2nd mission that Cortana has came back from the dead and Chief and the rest of spartan Blue Team were going to find her. He was technically going AWOL, but it’s also revealed that Cortana was now evil and he was trying to stop her. And all conflict between Chief and Locke was once scene obviously made for the trailers and awkwardly squeezed into the game where Locke attacked him and Chief kicked his ass
Hunt the Truth was the hypest I've ever been for a 343 halo. The pure mystery & intrigue of it all was so cool. Then they changed writers & dropped that story completely. It's hilarious because I always say that Halo 4 had a pretty good story & god awful gameplay. Whereas Halo 5 had a god awful story and pretty good gameplay.
Really dumb question here. Why is this spartan wearing a cloak? Is his suit not warm enough? It can protect him from the cold of space but not the cold of whatever planet he’s on?
In the movie, he has more Infinity Stones than this trailer shot.
This specific instance is a good bit of false advertising. But I think Marvel's also guilty of screwing with audiences. For example, the trailers for Iron Man 3 and Avengers 2 were much more mature/darker than what we got. Iron Man 3 also hyped up the Ben Kingsley Mandarin, and we all know what happened next.
Iron Man 3 also hyped up the Ben Kingsley Mandarin
That part wasn't a false advertising, he was treated as a Mandarin in the movie itself until the reveal. It's a twist within a movie and the trailer not spoiling it
I remember being home sick in second grade and being upset my mom couldn't find the tape with Watership Down on it. I had to settle by watching the Rankin Bass version of The Hobbit
I didn't watch Kangaroo Jack for years because I thought it was a movie about a "funny" talking animal, and I hated those kinds of movies even as a kid.
The marketing for Madame Web leaned heavily into the girls being in their outfits fighting Ezekiel to make it seem like more of a standard superhero film.
In the actual film, it's just one very short flash forward scene and the rest of the movie is just them running from the villain.
This movie was a long series of baffling decisions from start to finish. I know that's to be expected from the Sony Spiderverse films, but this truly had absolutely nothing going for it.
In the 80s, Disney tried to release Song of the South for home video. In the commercials, they ONLY showed the animated bits. The animated bits make up about only a third of the movie. The rest reminded the country why Song of the South got buried in the first place.
It's been a while but from what I remember originally there was a scene in the trailers where the dogs are talking to the human, which turned out to be a dream sequence but was presented as the dogs being able to talk throughout the movie.
as I've mentioned numerous times on this sub, Drew Barrymore's character of Casey Becker was front and center in advertising and this combined with her big-name actress made her come across as the main character. She's killed in the opening scene to establish that NOBODY is safe in this movie.
That wasnt even the original plan when writing the movie. Iirc she was offered the role of Sydney but liked the opening scene so much would only do it if she got the role of Casey
Wouldn't be the last time Sony used a post credit scene for attention in a trailer either. I remember they put the Vulture in every single Morbius trailer just for it to be a half-assed post credit that lead nowhere
8yo me still upset because the actual Pink Panther was never really in the movie.
I sat through the whole movie, waiting for the Pink Panther while playing toys and stuff because I was too dumb to process the plot of these "grown up movies" back then and ends up disappointed when he only appears for a few seconds at the end.
Holy shit me too. Obviously the pink panther was the diamond but why the hell did they make us think it'd be some buddy cop movie between him and the panther
I can actually explain this one. See, the Pink Panther cartoons were originally just the opening title sequence for a completely live action mystery movie, also called The Pink Panther. The movie was a hit and had numerous sequels, but the title sequence in particular was so popular it spawned its own cartoon show. So there are two different franchises, effectively, born from the same movie and with equal claim to the title The Pink Panther.
The trailer I saw for Pan's Labyrinth made it seem wondrous and fantastical. Which it is, except there's also the fascism and abuse and violence that the trailer absolutely did not prepare me for. Great movie, but not what the trailer implied at all.
(Of course, this was before we all learned what kind of movies del Toro makes. Now I'd be side-eyeing that trailer so hard.)
This is a rare example of the bait and switch actually becoming more liked as time goes on, because people actually now understand what the hell MGS2 was going for
Trailers for Bicentennial Man: "It's a wacky comedy with Robin Williams as a robot!"
Actually movie: A dramatic, philosophical look into what it means to be human, mortality and life in general. Also huge tearjerker 😭beautiful soundtrack too!
They advertised this movie as a kid’s movie that wouldn’t be for most audiences.
Instead they created one of the single best piece of Transformers media that everyone unanimously loved, but because of the advertising we will never get another Transformers One.
And rumor is right now that they're trying to reboot again by smashing One, Transformers 2007, and Bumblebee into one continuity despite them all heavily contradicting each other, and bringing back Bay of all people to direct. So if that's true then any kind of sequel to One would end up being forced to tie-in to that abomination of a movie. Fuck Paramount, man.
Latest Dreamwork's film "Forgotten Island" the trailer made it sounds like the MC get to mystical island that slowly took their memory and have to find their way home asap.
In the film it's actually The Hangover plot, the MC wake up on the beach with missing memory after a wild party, so they want to finds out what happened in order to go home.
Scenes in the trailer happens but it misdirects you with some lines that aren't in the film
Some spoiler for this scene in the trailer, Manananggal actually said "funny thing about mortals, when you tear them apart, they don't go back together"
So if you were a kid in the 2000s, you were bamboozled by at least three movies and their deceptive trailers: Kangaroo Jack, Bridge to Terabithia, or Snow Dogs.
However, there was also the trailer for The Haunted Mansion, the 2003 one with Eddie Murphy.
There was a TV spot that played all the time that explicitly says that the family needed to break the curse of the haunted mansion "before the clock strikes 13."
And so kid me thought that this was going to be a fun "race against time" kind of movie, and I thought it was an interesting spin on it.
I saw it on a field trip and...that is not at all what the movie is about. It's some insipid "love story" about Eddie Murphy's wife being the possible reincarnation of some guy's dead wife and forces her to marry him, it's all creepy and weird as fuck but it's made out to be some tragic love story in the end where he gets redeemed. (Just ignore the horrifying implications if he went through with the forced marriage, because the movie sure does)
Also the shot of the clock in the trailer is only in the opening sequence and is never shown or mentioned again.
They played Kangaroo Jack at a summer program thing. I cant imagine what the people who put it on thought. Cause not only was it not appropriate for children, but it was boring as fuck and not at all about a kangaroo who raps and talks smack
This is a less-extreme example, but I think it still fits. I absolutely LOVE the movie Brave, but I do feel like the trailer did not prepare me at all for HOW bear-centric it was going to be. The trailer barely has any bears in it, and I totally get that they did not want to spoil the fact that Merida's mom is a bear for the majority of the movie, but the first time I saw it I just felt kind of blindsided by the bears. The trailer makes it look like the situation between the clans is the focus of the movie, when that ends up being mostly a whacky B-plot happening in the background.
https://giphy.com/gifs/s7OqjXXl5f9tbLsyd1
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a more positive example since the advertising hides the fact that it is really a sequel to the original comics.
I’ll never understand why people refuse to advertise that something is a musical. Yes, there are plenty of jokes about how “silly” musicals are (“why are they randomly singing and dancing lol” because it’s a genre convention Micheal), but Mamma Mia! made an obscene amount of money despite most of the cast being at most only decent singers. People actually like musicals, advertise to them!
The commenters replying to this with "X was on Broadway for 30 years" seem to be really overestimating the broader public's awareness of broadway musicals
I deadass love that movie, but I am still genuinely pissed about Taskmaster, over one year later (not two like I originally said oops). She's all over the trailers, but has like 30 seconds in the movie.
Thunderbolts also happens to be one of the best representations of any adventuring party. Have only a basic idea what the hell they’re doing, bickering the whole time and somehow getting through it all.
The first half of the movie is even a reverse-dungeon crawl, trying to get out of the place instead of in.
There were a few movies that featured big stars in the trailer and then the only times they were in the movie were the scenes that they used in the trailer.
Liam Neeson - clash of the titans
Liam Neeson - battleship
Brian Cranston - Godzilla
Let me tell you all the tale of a little film called "Down and Derby." A movie about Pinewood Derby cars.
This is the actual DVD cover for this film (to my knowledge, "Rev'd Up Edition" is the only edition). You see that line 'the kids take the wheel?"
LOL no. The entire plot of the movie is, in fact, not about them at all. It's about the main character and his friends having never gotten over being lesser than the perfect kid during their childhood. So naturally this boils over to all their sons being in the same cub scout troop and the dad sees this as the perfect way to win his completely one-sided rivalry by robbing his son of the experience, dragging his old childhood friends along to commit Home Alone style petty crimes against a man who literally does nothing wrong for the entire movie. The main character nearly destroys his perfectly happy life, job, and everything else he values on this entirely idiotic obsession. Somehow, he's able to save his job with the pinewood derby cars because 'Japanese Business Men' and while he fails to actually beat his rival, his son does it for him because offscreen he got help from literal Pinewood Derby Jesus (the neighbor of the relative who the mom takes the kids to stay with due to the dad's growing obsessions). Also the rival does have a very loud tantrum at the end to try and make it seem like the completely illegal things the main character did were somehow justified.
You will notice Pat Morita is listed as being in this atrocity. He actually is in it...barely. Remember those 'Japanese Business Men' I mentioned? He's supposed to be some bigshot CEO and he shows up at the main character's house to shout 'RACECAR!' three times before disappearing from the plot. That is, tragically, the last credited film role for Pat Morita before he died.
Doctor Strange: multiverse of madness. All trailers made it seem like stephen would be facing alternate versions of himself that were evil only to have scarlet witch as main villain and random protege in america. ( Liked the movie none the less)
(Good example): The Lady in the Van DVD cover. It makes it out that James Corden is the joint second most important character alongside Alex Jennings, despite him having about 2-3 lines and less than a minute screen time in total.
What a garbage season. We were led to believe shit would hit the fan, not that half the season would be wasted on a dumb plot device and stretchy old people junk.
the first episodes of this were so good but the 'new game' totally ruined the vibe especially after they turned the main badass heroine into a useless damsel in distress and then a domesticated housewife after being rescued.
I'm told later seasons are better but I checked out
Obligatory mention of the SAO: Progressive novels. Because Aincrad was only two-volumes-and-change of the original novel series, the author has a side series where he goes back to the very beginning and covers the full events of the Aincrad death game with no large timeskips like the original novels/anime. Progressive really gets into the heads of Kirito and Asuna and shows how they were set on the path to become the lonely Black Swordsman and the de facto second-in-command of the advancing players respectively.
There are nine (soon to be ten) volumes so far covering the first eight floors of the castle, plus movie adaptations of the first-floor and fifth-floor stories.
Did anyone ever get into trouble over kangaroo jack? That shit was some of the worst false advertising i've ever seen. The trailers are straight up a blatant lie.
The trailers for the movie "Yesterday" included bits from a deleted scene featuring Ana de Armas.
I'm not too privy on the details but two guys sued Universal for false advertising with a judge ruling that the case move forward. But then they got too greedy and tried to sue Google too for including her on the cast list and asking for $5 million from Universal and I guess it just got too messy and the judge pulled a 180 and threw the case out. Something like that.
I love the pettiness that turns to absurd greed. How much would the judge have thought the initial damages would be? The cost of two tickets? Maybe food and drinks too? At best also the lost wages if they took the day off from work to see fucking Yesterday. So the guys see their $140 lawsuit is moving ahead and pull $5 million out of their asses.
The trailer for Brave made it seem like a story of a runaway princess who goes on this grand adventure that leads up to this battle with a great beast.
What actually happens is she turns her mom into a bear, and it becomes a scottish Brother Bear with basic kids humor.
I was like 12 years old when I saw this movie, and that was the first time I walked out of a theater feeling underwhelmed by a film.
Crimson Peak's trailer made it seem like it would be a horror movie about ghosts attacking in a haunted house. The ACTUAL movie is a very Gothic story but not a horror movie, and the ghosts are completly harmless (and not very present either).
The movie is genuinely amazing but as a 14yo who wanted some jumpscares i felt betrayed
Snow Dogs also pulled a Kangaroo Jack, prominently featuring talking huskies in the ad when it was a weird dream tge MC has after hitting his head when he tries to learn how to push.
3.3k
u/Wrong-Mouse-6499 3d ago
FUN FACT: Kangaroo Jack used to be a 18+ film called Down and Under, and test audiences HATED it. So they had to scramble to attract audiences, and they realized they had wacky kangaroos in that dream sequence, so after a lot of editing and false advertising we got Kangaroo Jack