10 AWESOME Movie Trailers (Then The Film Sucked)
2. Suicide Squad
The Trailer
Warner Bros. certainly knows how to cut a great trailer - three great trailers, even, in the case of David Ayer's 2016 Suicide Squad.
The first trailer, dropped during Comic-Con 2015, was a beautifully moody introduction to the titular group of degenerate anti-heroes - a gritty, serious piece of marketing which culminated in a brief glimpse of Batman (Ben Affleck) and a terrifying first look at Jared Leto's Joker.
In early 2016, the second trailer offered up a more irreverent, light-hearted look at the team, so brilliantly set to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." The sublime editing made it look nothing short of spectacular.
And similarly, the third and final trailer - this time scored to Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" - made a compelling argument that Suicide Squad would be the DCEU's answer to Guardians of the Galaxy.
The Film
How depressing it was to sit in a cinema and quickly realise what a hacked-up, chopped-to-pieces mess Suicide Squad actually was.
As would be revealed later, director Ayer and Warner Bros. executives fought over the movie's final cut, Ayer favouring the grittier men-on-a-mission movie implied by the first trailer, while the top brass craved something frothier.
Several competing cuts of the film were screened for test audiences, including one created by Trailer Park, the company that cut the film's trailers. And ultimately it's this one which became the finished movie.
Yet editing a trailer and a movie require very different skill sets, and so it's little surprise that the final film feels basically like a two-hour trailer: frantically edited to within an inch of its life, and jam-packed with pop music.
Beyond that, it was a tonal car crash - a result of the attempt to split the difference between Ayer and the studio's visions - Jared Leto's Joker was barely in it, and villain Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) downright sucked.
For a lot of people, Suicide Squad was a blast of cold water to the face - an all-timer reminder of the power of marketing, and how incredibly deceptive it can be.