10 Cloverfield Lane: 8 Reasons The Marketing Was Genius

7. The Trailers Didn't Mis-Sell The Movie

If liars want to make a career out of their personality defect, they turn to politics. If that doesn't work out, then they go into trailer editing. Seriously, trailers are notorious for the flagrant, thoughtless, blatant mis-selling of movies, and that's before we get to the prevalence of marketing campaigns that give away every little of the plot. When they're not making Drive look like Fast And Furious, they're totally misrepresenting the tone of big blockbusters to make you think it's more like that other thing you liked (just think of how many jovial movies lead with dark and brooding teasers). That's not the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. While the marketing was built almost entirely around mystery, it never twisted that mystery to make the movie look like something it wasn't. The first trailer showed Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher, Jr. stuck in a bunker as possibly unwilling guests of John Goodman as it gradually emerged there was something bigger going on. And that is exactly what the finished film is, with the trailers only having a slight alteration of narrative order to better keep things tight. Across the other adverts (there were a couple of more, shorter trailers and TV spots), the film maintained this approach, and in fact managed to mimic the shifting sense of safety; in the movie Michelle jumps back and forth in trusting Howard, and the trailers replicated that confusion ahead of time. Trailers that sell a basic premise while also managing to encapsulate the feeling of the movie proper? Crazy.