10 Movies That Were Just Trailers For Other Movies

Hollywood loves to make movies. Obviously.

It's how they make money, it's how they gauge success, it's how and why they do everything they do. And in today's marketplace, the more movies you can make out of a single property, the better. Why just have one Twilight: Breaking Dawn film when you can split it in two? Why even settle for just a potential Dracula trilogy when you can play the long-game and have Dracula sequels, spin-offs, and reboots for decades to come?

The easiest and most common way that studios profit off of this is turning one film into a setup for another film. Rather than using the idea they have for the film they're making, they make a film building up to that idea so that they get two films and audiences get more movie. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not when that setup film winds up being little more than a two-hour trailer for what is to come. Whether it be belated sequels attempting to get audiences back onboard for future adventures or misplaced attempts at kickstarting shared universes, these are the films that cheated audiences out of what they wanted to see in the first place.

In 2010, the Predator franchise got what looked to be a major facelift from the uber-successful producer, Robert Rodriguez.

The film promised to deliver on many of the things Predator fans had been waiting decades to see. For the first time, it would take the action off-world and be centered in space, all while fleshing out the mythology and methodology of the Yautja.

The only catch was, it never really delivered on any of those promises.

Yes, the film is technically set off-world, but it isn't on the Predator homeworld, it's just another planet with jungles that look exactly like the ones here on Earth. And while there are a few new touches, such as the Pred-dogs or the Berserker Predator, it never comes close to revitalizing the franchise like Rodriguez had teased.

And that's because Rodriguez had to gut his original script. As has been revealed since, Rodriguez wrote a ginormous space epic of a film but Fox got cold feet, refusing to foot the bill for it. Thus, Rodriguez and co. had to make a smaller Predator film successful first and could then move on to the bigger and better things that were originally in-store.

The film ends on a note that promises the next film will actually take the story into space, but the film under-grossed and audiences never got to see the film they should have gotten in the first place.