10 Ways Trailers Let You Know A Movie Is Secretly Awful
You'll never waste your money on a ticket again.
It's stating the obvious that trailers are carefully crafted to trick us into seeing a movie, regardless of the quality. As frustrating as it may be when we're duped into watching something terrible, that's just the way marketing works and we have to accept it. Right? Not exactly. Trailers for bad movies might dupe you from time to time, but if you know what to look out for then you start to notice a number of red flags that inadvertently tell you a film is going to be awful.
Some of these are obvious - the names Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Michael Bay can send countless movie fans running from a movie like it's the plague, and likewise if the trailer features atrocious dialogue, terrible acting and dodgy special effects you can be sure the finished product isn't going to be any better. But other red flags require a little more industry know-how to spot, where editing techniques, sound design and other technical traits betray the film's true awfulness.
Trailer editors are paid well to polish cinematic turds, but they also repeat these tricks over and over again, giving the game away to the savvy viewer. From the use of sound effects to the words you see on the screen, here are ten signs a trailer is telling you the movie is awful. Keep these in mind and you'll never waste your money on a ticket again.