There's a sure genius to constructing a movie trailer; though we seldom find out who the folks are behind them, they are specially drafted in outside of the movie's own editing team to put together an exciting trailer to sell the movie to as many people as possible. A great trailer - for a blockbuster, at least - will generally feature epic, visceral music, and seek to demonstrate just how awesomely action-packed the film is going to be, perhaps showing off a few tasty visual effects shots in the process. Some trailers are so effective at selling the movie that the final product can't possibly live up to it, and the result is tremendous disappointment en masse. These are 10 films that are a testament to the skill of the editors who cut the trailers, managing to take a mound of crap and shape it into something that looked nothing less than awesome. In each instance, our hopes were high, yet the filmmakers couldn't at all live up to the expectations these trailers set for us...
10. Max Payne
When the trailer for the Mark Wahlberg-starring Max Payne adaptation finally hit, I was
so excited; it seemed like a filmmaker had finally done the video game medium justice. A hip Marilyn Manson song gave the trailer an eerie atmosphere, combined with John Moore's exceptional visuals, which showed off how closely the film was going to stick to the noirish style and tone of the source material. The latter part of the trailer explodes into violence and shows Max running down a hallway while being shot at, before performing an epic, John Woo-esque dive through a doorway. It seemed like it was going to be a perfectly faithful video game adaptation. Then the movie came out, and it turned out that most of the action was shown off in the trailers, Mila Kunis was an awful fit for Mona Sax (hence her limited presence in the trailer), and Wahlberg essentially sleep-walked his way through the role. So disappointing.