Is there anything more annoying than watching a trailer for a movie, only to be completely confounded when you actually go to watch the full feature, and find that it's nothing like you were led to believe? For a variety of reasons, studios will frequently cut a trailer to deceive audiences of the product they're getting; while sometimes this can be fortuitous - in preventing the viewer from guessing a twist early on in the film - it's usually a shady practise to dupe people into seeing a film that the studio knows is a turkey, or to make an "arty" film appear more mainstream. If a Terrence Malick film ever has an fart joke sequence, for instance, you can bet your bottom dollar that the trailer would milk the Hell out of it and reap a load more ticket sales. For better and for worse, here are 10 movie trailers that totally lied to us...
10. Inglourious Basterds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sQhTVz5IjQ Don't think for a second that I didn't enjoy Quentin Tarantino's Nazi-hunting escapade, because I totally did, but the marketing for the film was clearly positioned in a way to make people think they were getting a more single-minded film than they actually got. You'll notice that the above trailer features only one shot of Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), despite the fact that she's essentially the movie's protagonist (or at least one of them) and is completely instrumental in the narrative from start to finish. Dreyfus' revenge plot against the Nazis comprises the film's emotional core, making it more a character-driven outing rather than a simplistic exploitation film. This trailer suggests we're going to get the Kill Bill version of a Tarantino film, a flippant, unremittingly violent gore-fest, when really, the film probably has a lot more in common with Q's talkier, more deliberate films. Of course, any Tarantino fan worth their salt knew never to expect the expected from the director, but mainstream audiences - and I know this from several conversations with acquaintances - said they found the talkiness and overt length surprising given the expectations raised by the marketing.