10 Worst Movie Trailers Of All Time

9. The American

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ChQB0vpCQWw Movie trailers are definitely giving away too much these days; I miss the days when trailers served more as a teaser, just giving a basic outlay of the plot but not going into specifics. With audiences being more demanding these days - and there being more fierce competition for our money - studios feel that they have to give us more insight into what we're going to be paying for, so in many cases they'll just spell everything out, or in more crass terms, actually sell us a movie that's different to the one we end up watching. So is the case with Anton Corbijn's The American, a slow-burn existential drama about an assassin re-examining his life that has essentially been edited here to resemble a frenetic, relentless action film. Thus many audiences were baffled when the film was a slow, talky drama rather than an action-packed spectacle, and in fact, the trailer shows pretty much every single action beat, because there's really not much of it. It's a cheap move because The American was far from a bad movie, but the studio was cynical enough that they felt they had to dupe viewers into seeing it rather than promote the film's many assets. Terrible.