10 Recent Movie Trailers That Totally Lied To You
5. Mean Girls
It's become an increasing trend in recent years for movie musical trailers to downplay or even wholly conceal the fact that they're a musical, given the genre's declining popularity in recent years.
And so with that in mind, the marketing for last year's adaptation of the Mean Girls stage musical opted to show virtually zero footage of any characters singing, despite the final film featuring over a dozen musical sequences.
Rather, the trailers showed only brief slivers of context-free dancing, which certainly didn't even remotely suggest that the film would be a musical.
Clearly, Paramount wanted to present it as more of a soft reboot of the original 2004 film on which the musical is based, as that was the commercially safe - albeit more grossly manipulative - option.
Ultimately the gambit paid off, as despite some audience members expressing outrage at being bamboozled with a surprise musical, Mean Girls 2024 went on to gross over $100 million worldwide.