10 Recent Movies Ruined By Their Marketing
2. Abigail
Marketing a movie about a vampiric ballerina picking off a houseful of her kidnappers should've been piss-easy, but Abigail had one big problem - that reveal doesn't come until half-way through.
Despite this, the movie's trailers freely dispensed with the mid-film twist, that this adorable ballet dancer (Alisha Wier) is actually an extremely dangerous, blood-sucking beast.
And so, when audiences sat down to watch Abigail for themselves, they unsurprisingly got restless waiting for the vampire shenanigans to kick off.
It's almost a full hour before Abigail shows her fangs, and had Universal marketed the film a little more cleverly, it could've been a shocking surprise on par with From Dusk Till Dawn's genre-shifting twist at the mid-point.
The trailers could've simply suggested that something was off with Abigail without straight-up confirming what it was, in turn helping build buzz by focusing on the mystery of precisely what she is.
Instead, it was clear that the filmmakers intended for the vampire reveal to be a left-field surprise, and yet the trailers gave it away for free, ensuring many viewers were left impatiently sitting through 50 minutes of build-up.
This likely isn't the sole reason that Abigail flopped at the box office, but it certainly didn't help.