10 Movie Trailers That Totally Trolled Audiences

3. Collateral Beauty

Audiences looking for a frothy, sappy, middle-brow drama starring a fleet of Oscar-hopeful actors were absolutely blindsided when they sat down to watch Collateral Beauty and realised the actual movie was something completely different.

The trailers focused on the anguish of Will Smith's bereaved protagonist, Howard Inlet, struggling to cope with his daughter's death, as well as a supernatural element where Howard is visited by physical manifestations of Love (Keira Knightley), Death (Helen Mirren) and Time (Jacob Latimore).

But in reality, the film's plot is not this at all. Yes, Smith loses his daughter, but for 99% of the movie, Love, Death and Time are not fantastical in the slightest.

Rather, they're three actors hired by Howard's business partners (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Pena) in an attempt to "prove" that he's mentally ill - by filming him talking to the actors and then digitally removing them - in order to sack him from their company and protect their business. Yup.

What was sold as a tear-jerking movie about a man learning to cope with death is actually centred on a group of selfish a**holes trying to save their business by framing a grieving man as psychotic.

Outrageously, though, the film's ending pulls a double-twist to reveal that, in fact, the three actors were Love, Death and Time all along.

Warner Bros. presumably figured this cruel premise would be a tough sell with Christmas-time audiences, so decided to re-frame it as something entirely more palatable.

And the plan worked, as despite universal critical scorn, Collateral Beauty actually turned a modest profit.