10 Awesome Trailers That Tricked Us Into Seeing Awful Movies
These movies stole your money, but they looked good while doing it.
Though they can be awe-inspiring pieces of art in their own right, the job of a movie trailer is - first and foremost - to sell you the movie.
As a result, they typically try and cram in the most eye-popping, emotional, or scary moments, the stuff that will instantly hook today's share-happy online culture and prompt people to talk with their friends.
But on occasion, that initial buzz can give way to disappointment when the movie itself is finally released.
Because at that point, most of us have already seen all the cool bits in the pre-release trailers and we've been fed a steady diet of digestible, entertaining two-minute slices of footage for months. It's quite hard to separate the adrenaline rush a trailer can give you from the slower pace of the film itself, and over the years, plenty of films have suffered due to the lofty expectations created by their marketing campaigns.
These trailers did their job and they did it well, duping us into thinking the movie itself would be something more than what it turned out to be. How wrong we were.
10. Lady In The Water
There used to be a time when the name "M. Night Shyamalan" elicited nothing but excitement.
After The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village were big hits with audiences (and the first two were big hits with critics), it seemed like the director could do no wrong, which absolutely piled the hype onto Lady In The Water.
And the trailer aided this hype immensely. Consisting of nothing more than a beautifully ethereal score and several shots of a man going about his day, it teased a simple, uncluttered tale with a supernatural twinge, a departure from Shyamalan's increasingly complex psychological stories.
It looked fresh and different, and yet, because of the name that was attached, we all assumed it would be just as engaging as his other projects.
But that wasn't the case at all. Why? The movie was a self-indulgent bore. Shyamalan starred as a writer whose words could change the world, and he also included a film critic character in an antagonistic role, a jab at those who had negatively reviewed his prior work. You could feel the arrogance emanating from each frame.
The film's fantasy elements were also poorly fleshed out, and looking back, it's clear that Shyamalan's early success had gone to his head, Lady In The Water being the moment his massive ego came crashing down around him.
The movie rightfully sank at the box-office, an outcome nobody could have predicted given how unique and promising its trailer looked.