2. The Road
I suppose you probably shouldn't have expected anything different from the famously nihilistic subject matter, but the way the studio dressed this one up was somewhat bizarre. Of course, going all in and saying the whole thing was bleak, slow and only contained the bare bones of a plot probably wouldn't have been the right way to go. Yet if that's the case, why adapt it at all? Obviously, the reason was money after the runaway success of No Country For Old Men Hollywood began to re-wake up to the filmic potential of Cormac McCarthy's back-catalogue. So really, it was only natural that the Weinsteins would attempt to strike gold again with something close to home. But as I've already stated, there was a problem unlike No Country, which featured at its core a tight, easily definable plot about escaping the wrath of an atrociously-haired man, The Road is far more nebulous. The Man and The Boy both brilliantly played by the way don't really have much of a goal beyond survival, so the whole thing plays as the most harrowing, downbeat sight-seeing tour you're ever likely to witness. However, putting bums on seats for such a spectacle is a really difficult sales pitch for anybody, so they tarted it up a bit with Hollywood glamour. To this end, they submitted a trailer which seemed to focus on the apocalypse, Charlize Theron and featured an incongruous explosion which had no business in the final cut. If you didn't know the author's books, you might've expected something Day After Tomorrow-esque, albeit with a more auteur edge. What you got instead was Viggo Mortensen scrabbling in the dirt, which for the unsuspecting must've seemed like a slap in the face.