10 Epic Movie Trailers That Set The Bar Too High
6. The Last Airbender
Next we have one of the most notoriously bad adaptations ever put to the big screen. M. Night Shyamalan's career was not on the up and up in the late 2000s and his magnum opus of garbage arrived in 2010.
Judging by the first teaser trailer however, you wouldn't know that. Boasting a powerful music score and great sense of scale, the teaser for The Last Airbender set the stage for an epic confrontation. The Avatar trains atop a cliff for the battle to come and as the camera pans away from the area, we see the fleet of fire-bender ships preparing to attack.
The aesthetics were on point and the overall tone appeared to match the series. It should have been a detailed recreation of the source material. What audiences got instead was a disaster. Any efforts to take the source material and elevate it to a greater scale fell flat. It also completely missed the mark when it came to matching the personality of the popular characters.
Nothing about it works; while the critics were angered by it, long-term fans of the anime were furious. The potential of that initial trailer was instantly squandered; perhaps the trailer set expectations that were too high to meet? Many would instead argue that M Night. was ill suited to tackle the property.