10 Awesome Trailers That Tricked Us Into Seeing Awful Movies

8. The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower is one of Stephen King's most beloved series of books, so expectations were high for the movie adaptation the very second it was announced.

The casting of the brilliant Idris Elba and the Oscar-winning Matthew McConaughey sent those prior expectations crashing through the roof, and though the film's second trailer arrived later than expected, it looked awesome enough to excuse its lack of punctuality.

The action was super-slick and incredibly stylish, with Elba oozing cool and looking like a bonafide badass as he reloaded his guns by catching the fresh bullets in midair. It looked like a Taken-esque action movie with a sci-fi edge, and a peppering of Stephen King magic thrown in for good measure.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, just about everything. Far too short, far too generic and far too simplistic (considering the density of the novels), The Dark Tower was a critical and box-office slump, and its failure was only made to seem worse when another King adaptation - It - performed exceptionally well just one month later.

It felt extremely undercooked and rushed, its brief, obviously studio-mandated runtime only exacerbating the film's breezy, brainless feel. We probably won't get another Dark Tower movie, so let's all pray for the in-development TV series.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!