10 Bad Movies With Great Trailers

Thumbs up on YouTube, thumbs down in cinemas.

Joker Suicide Squad
Warner Bros.

Without having to put on a comfortable pair of slippers, recline in a comfortable armchair and deride the youth of today for spending all their time glued to mobile devices, it must be said; back in the day, it was a lot more difficult to sell a movie to the public.

Much like the business itself, marketing campaigns for movies have evolved to cope with the changes in technology. Through viral campaigns, social media contests, set videos, TV spots, teasers for trailers, teaser trailers, actual trailers and more, even smaller movies have an inbuilt platform to build awareness with a potential audience. Long gone are the days of having to rewind a VHS to watch trailers or those infuriating DVDs that wouldn't let you fast forward them.

A surgically precise marketing campaign is all well and good to convince people to go and see your movie, but it's much more important for the final product to be able to back it up once butts are actually in seats in the theater. No amount of good advertising can compensate for a terrible movie, and if your movie sucks, in today's digital age everybody and their dog is going to know that fact sooner rather than later.

10. 9

Joker Suicide Squad
Focus Features

The sentence 'steampunk post-apocalyptic puppet animation' even sounds cool, so it was a real shame when Shane Acker's 9 failed to live up to the undoubted potential shown in his original student film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

With the presence of aesthetically-driven filmmakers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov as producers and a $30m budget, Acker must have been confident in stretching out the eleven-minute concept into a full-length feature. When the first trailer dropped, so were plenty of other people.

There's no denying that on a technical level 9 is incredibly impressive, with Acker showing huge ambition and a real knack for world-building, but on a narrative level the movie starts to fall apart. The movie aimed high and wasn't objectively terrible, but the final product made it abundantly clear that the story simply wasn't enough to hold an entire movie together, leaving 9 as a disappointing missed opportunity.

Contributor

I don't do social media, so like or follow me in person but please maintain a safe distance or the authorities will be notified. Don't snap me though, I'll probably break. I was once labelled a misogynist on this very site in a twenty paragraph-long rant for daring to speak ill of the Twilight franchise. I stand by what I said, it's crap.