10 Movie Trailers That Totally Trolled Audiences
Remember when Serenity was an Oscar hopeful? No?
Movie trailers exist for one reason: to get your butt in a cinema seat by any means necessary.
And though a glossy, exciting trailer is one way to do it, sometimes studios decide that's not enough, and they resort to actively toying with audience expectations, for better or for worse.
The debate about misleading movie trailers is a nuanced and complex one, because as often as studios will cynically misrepresent a film's tone and plot for commercial reasons, sometimes they will deliberately mislead audiences in order to surprise them a little more pleasantly.
To be clear, this list won't include movies that changed during production - namely Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - but instead films that intentionally played with audiences, whether maliciously or for "noble" ends, and gave them a differently movie from the one they were sold.
These trailers all carried out a bait-and-switch, and whether it was worth it or not generally depends on the ultimate quality of the film itself.
Was a panicky studio simply trying to salvage a box office dud, or were talented artists attempting to keep audiences in the dark until they saw the movie for themselves?
Either way, these trailers expertly trolled audiences and left them hopefully thinking a little more critically about the way they consume movie marketing...