10 Movie Trailers That Cleverly Hid Huge Spoilers

4. Leslie's Death - Bridge To Terabithia

The Spoiler

That young protagonist Jess Aarons' (Josh Hutcherson) new friend Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb) actually dies in the third act of the movie in a fairly benign accident.

Moreover, the film is less about a fantasy world imagined by the two kids, but more about their friendship, and Jess eventually learning to cope with Leslie's death.

How The Trailer Hid It

In a feat of marketing both clever and crude, Summit Entertainment sold Bridge to Terabithia as a conventional fantasy film, focusing squarely on its fairly scant assortment of CGI spectacle while presenting it as "real" rather than imagined.

As such, this is a case of a movie's trailer misrepresenting its tone sufficiently that the big spoiler could never be guessed - because who would've watched that trailer and assumed this film was anything more than an inoffensive fantasy flick with nothing interesting to say about the human condition?

Though it's certainly easy to decry the marketing approach, it did allow Summit and the filmmakers to basically have their cake and eat it. The film went on to gross almost $140 million worldwide (against a $25 million budget), while fully retaining the soul and spirit of the affecting source material.