10 AWESOME Movie Trailers (Then The Film Sucked)
3. The Black Dahlia
The Trailer
2006's neo-noir crime thriller The Black Dahlia was heavily marketed as a major comeback for director Brian De Palma, with its main trailer successfully touting it as a classy, beautifully staged slice of true crime with possible awards potential.
With its ripped-from-the-headlines murder-mystery story, hard-boiled narration from Josh Hartnett, and the extremely inspired use of Death in Vegas' haunting tune "Dirge," it suggested a powerhouse effort from De Palma to stand alongside his finer, older work.
The Film
Despite being adapted from a book written by L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia fell massively short of the mark, turning out to be a strangely generic, even forgettable noir romp largely lacking in the full-bodied flourishes that define De Palma's best films.
Josh Hartnett is ultimately miscast as the lead, and the outcome of the mystery is a lot less interesting than that beautiful trailer suggested.
And because the $50 million thriller flopped catastrophically at the box office, De Palma's career as an A-list filmmaker effectively ended with its release.