12 Brilliant Movies That Completely Lied What They Were About
3. Monsters
The Lie: The marketing for Monsters heavily played up the notion that it was basically a low-budget Cloverfield, focusing on the CGI-driven mayhem as an alien creature lays waste to Mexico.
The Reality: Gareth Edwards' film in fact barely featured alien monsters at all, and instead focused on a road trip through Mexico as a photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) attempts to get a young woman (Whitney Able) back to the U.S. Part-road movie and part-romance, the monsters appear only occasionally and really just set the backdrop of love against adversity, causing many to express disdain that the film was not the action-driven monster movie they had been sold.
Edwards himself even commented on how hard the film was to market and basically admits that audiences were misled, saying, "Its like someone said the other day, they saw it and said, `Were you trying to make a love story for boys or a monster movie for girls? And I sort of went, `Actually I was trying to make a road movie for aliens. So I think I completely f***ed it up." When you promise a blockbuster and deliver art house, the primary ticket-buying audience at large is never going to be happy.