10 Ways Trailers Are Secretly Ruining Movies

5. False Advertising

Though it became something of a joke online that a woman sued FilmDistrict because Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive was not what she perceived it to be advertised as - that's a Fast and the Furious-style racing movie - she did sort of have a point about movie trailers in general. It's safe to say that Drive was marketed as a slick action movie, which is a little bit crass considering that what we got was a slow-moving art-house genre film with lots of silent glances and, in actual fact, not that much action. While what we got is almost certainly better than what was advertised, that's not really the point; it's about what you present to a prospective audience, and what you deliver on. It just leaves a foul taste in the audience's mouth; don't promise them one thing and deliver another. It's a cheap way to basically cheat money out of people, and whether this should be a legal issue or not is an interesting one; how much do audiences consent to being deceived? Is that just part and parcel of the process? Should viewers do their own reading beforehand?