10 Movie Trailers That Totally Lied To Audiences

By Shaun Munro /

4. Sweeney Todd

One of the more egregious, even hilariously underhanded attempts at deceiving an audience, the trailer for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd completely glosses over the fact that the story is a musical, devoting a whole 20 seconds in the middle of the trailer to a clip of Johnny Depp singing, while otherwise painting the story as a straight narrative. It would be very easy for audiences to assume from the simple amount of un-sung dialogue we hear throughout that the brief moment of Depp singing is simply one isolated sequence from the film, when in fact, of course, the entire film is a musical. It's all the more bizarre considering that most people know what they're getting with a Burton film, so there shouldn't be a need to dupe audiences into coming to see it under false pretences. It's like those foreign language movies that have trailers which don't feature any dialogue; omission of pertinent information is still lying to consumers; don't dress it up any differently.