r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 3d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) False advertising

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  1. 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
  2. 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)
5.9k Upvotes

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1.9k

u/singleguy79 3d ago

Trailers made it seem like a Narnia type movie.

555

u/Original-R-Kelly-Fan 3d ago edited 3d ago

still a banger but yeah i remember watching on a dvd player on road trips and always wanting the narnia shit to show up

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u/Dobvius 3d ago

Great movie but certainly not what I was expecting. My young self was not ready to feel those emotions 😭

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u/ElectronicCounty5490 2d ago

Yeah, I loved it so much until I hated it so much

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u/Facebones72 3d ago

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.

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u/corvidcthulhu 3d ago

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.

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u/bobbery5 3d ago

Oh dang, another Brittany Murphy movie to watch!

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u/Historical_Sugar9637 3d ago

Exactly the one I was thinking of too!

It's still a good movie. But it was completely dishonest about what kind of movie it was.

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u/Plenty-Goose-4508 3d ago

It kinda had to to hide the big twist

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u/Historical_Sugar9637 3d ago

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.

5

u/Plenty-Goose-4508 3d ago

Well it was made by Disney, so…

0

u/Bobthemime 3d ago

the movie adapted a book that came out 30 years prior..

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u/Historical_Sugar9637 3d ago

Did you want to reply to the other person?
In any case movie trailers don't usually give away the big climax/twist of a story in their trailers, even if they are based on books.

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u/Bobthemime 3d ago

shit ye i did.. no clue why it replied to you

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u/kazmosis 3d ago

I think that was actually a good move and made that moment all the more heartbreaking

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u/Thin-Nerve6367 3d ago

Yeah I mean when I first watched it as a kid I was disappointed the fantasy stuff was fake but still really liked the movie

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u/mimitchi33 3d ago

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.

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u/StabbyBoo 3d ago

I read this in 5th grade innn... 1999? When I saw the trailers they were putting out for this, I laughed my ass off. You poor kids.

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u/MasterSergei 3d ago

Not having seen it, what kind of movie is it exactly?

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u/TheMagi7 3d ago

All the fantasy elements are things the kids are imagining.

The real story is about a kid who is being bullied makes friends with someone and they end up imagining a kingdom together they feel safe in. The friend ends up dying and the story focuses ariund the emotions about a friend's unexpected death.

It's genuinely a really good movie for kids, especially with managing grief after a tragedy. I remember liking it when I was young.

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u/stopitunclerandy 1d ago

Its not fair dammit, they were supposed to grow up and fall in love and get married

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u/gregorydgraham 3d ago edited 3d ago

So it’s Beautiful Heavenly Creatures but for Yanks?

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u/sonicparadigm 3d ago

Beautiful Creatures came out 6 years after Bridge to Terabithia. Did you mean Heavenly Creatures?

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u/gregorydgraham 3d ago

Damn it! I knew I was getting it wrong, because I always get it wrong but I didn’t check.

Thank you for the correction

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u/ecstasyinwaves 3d ago

not even in the same balllpark. Firstly, Heavenly Creatures is about a murder case. Terabithia is about a tragic accident that no one's at fault for. They're children too, not teens. It's not a thriller its just a tragedy. Heavenly Creatures might be one of the worst fucking comparisons to make, tbh. Terabithia isn't a true crime movie either

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u/captain_blazar 3d ago edited 2d ago

Not a bit. Despite the advertising not matching the 2007 movie, the book came out 30* years prior in 1977. Katherine Paterson wrote it to help her son who had lost a friend very young (the girl was 8, and struck by lightning 3 years before BtT was published).

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u/IrishViking22 3d ago

Might want to check your math there

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u/captain_blazar 2d ago

Well what do you know. I have dyscalculia as it happens, so that’s closer than I usually get.

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u/Realistic-Scene-4150 3d ago

It's a classic children's novel that long predates that film.

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u/gravitybulliesme 3d ago

It tricks you into thinking it's a fantasy movie, when in reality it's a coming-of-age drama focused on themes about escapism, love, friendship, family issues, and a LOT of grief/childhood trauma

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u/jerrymatcat 3d ago

Its been ages since I've seen it but it's about these two kids who don't have alot of friends but both realise they are simular and I think the boy shows the girl a rope swing which can bring them into an imaginary land it's mostly just a friendship story with some magical scenes to show what they are imagining

one day when the boy leaves the girl goes on the rope swing but falls into the river and dies and the boy has to go to her funeral and her family blames him for her death at the end i think he sort of gets over it and shows his sister the imaginary world

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u/hhmCameron 3d ago

It is somewhat based on a true story, but the death was different

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u/etaoin-shrdl-ugh 3d ago

It’s been a few years, but doesn’t he blame himself? Because he was off on a day trip with the music teacher he had a crush on, and didn’t invite his friend to join. Then that day she was alone and used the rope but it snapped and she hit her head, and it creates this whole “could he have saved her if he had been there?” guilt in his mind. But I don’t think her parents blamed him— I think he was struggling a lot with the fact that they didn’t blame him, and instead they were really loving to him and grateful that the daughter had him because she had been a lonely kid

Apparently this story has been occupying a lot of my mental real estate for the last 20 years

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u/AmArschdieRaeuber 3d ago

Teen drama about a two friends making up a fantasy word and the girl dying. It's all in their head and it's mainly about coping with grief.

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u/Ok_Programmer_1022 3d ago

It's the movie that you put for your kids then you see them crying after it because you just gave them their first trauma.

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u/Wchijafm 3d ago

You ever seen the movie "my girl"? Its got a similar ending

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u/Far-Mammoth-3214 3d ago

it’s not?

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u/FishWithLegsAndArms 3d ago

Nope. Terebithia is 100% imaginary. 

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u/Woolies_White_Leg 3d ago

So is John wick but we still like those movies anyway

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u/kirbyverano123 3d ago

What you'd expect: Fantasy Adventure movie

What you got: Emotional damage

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u/Budget_Newspaper_489 3d ago

bro just activated my trauma

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u/FlyOrdinary1104 3d ago

I had the foresight to know what happens from reading the book in 4th grade. I remember seeing the trailer and going “oh, doesn’t the girl die and it’s super fucked up?”

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u/medusadraconis 3d ago

I went in expecting whimsy and a hidden world and came out with trauma. 💔

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u/FishWithLegsAndArms 3d ago

I read the book and when the kids favorite teacher showed up and invited him, and only him, to go to a museum with her, I was expecting it to go HORRIBLE places.  I was very relieved when nothing happened and the teacher was just a kind lady who cares about her students. I guess it is just a nice story about friendship. 

Needless to say, the plot twist got me real bad. 

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u/KadajjXIII 3d ago

Expectation: something fucked up is about to happen

Reality: That situation was totally fine, but something else fucked up happens

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u/FishWithLegsAndArms 3d ago

Right after too! So I let my guard down and immediately get suckerpunched!!

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u/CasualMillionaireTX 3d ago

This book was part of our curriculum in sixth grade. I think the movie came out a year or two later and I couldn't watch it. I only watched it for the first time in the last ten years...could not imagine seeing this movie and not knowing what was coming 😭

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u/unbanned_lol 3d ago

My wife and I had this experience with Pan's Labyrinth. We only saw a couple of movie trailers and none of them showed the violence. Del Toro's previous movie was Hellboy, which was a fun, campy flick. At most we thought it was a darker fantasy film, but man we were wrong. We weren't alone though: Several people walked out of that movie while we were there. We stuck it out, but my wife was not happy.

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u/Bobbington12 3d ago

This movie completely gutted me as a kid. Amazing film, but a real emotional gut-punch early on in life lol.

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u/Legitimate_Soup3304 3d ago

Which makes it all the more traumatizing 

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u/liquidWater12 3d ago

I cried in the theater as a kid. First time I was ever brought to tears by a work of fiction

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u/bdw312 3d ago

We read the book in 6th grade, because I grew up in a time of wagons and horses...the 1990s...

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u/Vivics36thsermon 3d ago

One of my mom’s picked up this movie. I think it is gonna be Narnia and she felt horrible when everyone was ugly crying.

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u/AmaranthWrath 3d ago

When my friend worked at Blockbuster, she had to repeatedly tell parents that this was going to hurt their kids' feelings bc so many parents would come back and bitch at the blockbuster staff for not warning them.

1

u/Cookie_Kiki 3d ago

I didn't watch it for years because the marketing made me think they had fucked the book up.

1

u/Effective_Reason2077 3d ago

As someone who read the book when he was young, I was fully aware from the get go the trailers were lying.

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u/TheDarwinski 2d ago

What's the movie actually about?

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u/Dieh361 1d ago

I’ve seen this one before, Josh Hutcherson plays the main character right?

-4

u/Bobthemime 3d ago

To be honest.. if you'd read the book, you knew what you were getting before watching the movie..

This is like complaining Titanic is a Romance movie that gets blindsided and turns into an action tradegy

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u/Rustcityafternon 3d ago

not that many people read the book what an odd comment to write

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u/SlightlySychotic 3d ago

It was required reading at my school. But a lot of my reading curriculum could have best been described as “misery porn.” So it might just be me.

Did you guys have to read Sounder? Because I swear I had to read that twice.

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u/Realistic-Scene-4150 3d ago

There's a period of school that seems to just be like "Now the kids need to learn that life is awful."

For me within two years it was Night, Where the Red Fern Grows, Sounder, and Bridge to Terebithia.

Night was the one we read earliest (fifth grade) and by far the most disturbing though. Being based on real events and about the Holocaust.

I know tons of people who had Bridge and Where the Red Fern Grows, Sounder and Night seem to have been less common. Sounder is great though. Just pure fucking misery. "Oh the loveable dog gets shot but he doesn't die! He just lives crippled and deformed until dying later in a very sad way!"

Those books influenced my tastes a lot. I love misery porn.

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u/Realistic-Scene-4150 3d ago

It was a very, very commonly assigned book for later grade school or middle school reading in large parts of the US.

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u/Bobthemime 3d ago

Why is it odd to write that there was a book so people shocked at what happened is dumfounding?

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u/SpookySnep 3d ago

You're catching downvotes for coming off like a smug asshole, not for the content of what you said.

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u/OutOfFrustration 3d ago

Yeah, but the marketing made me think they reinterpreted the book (i.e., trashed it). I've never seen the movie because of the baffling marketing.

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u/Realistic-Scene-4150 3d ago

To be fair, how else do you market that story without giving anything away?

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u/SpookySnep 3d ago

The sinking of the Titanic is a real life event, BtT is a fiction novel, they are not the same.

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u/Bobthemime 3d ago

no shit sherlock.. but its actual complaints i've seen levied at Titanic both when it came out and now years later..

I've seen reviews where they didnt like the boat sank in the end..