10 Worst Movie Trailers Of The 2010s
These trailers were so abysmal they were physically painful to watch...
The 2010s had its fair share of bad movies, and with the increasing prominence of review-aggregation websites such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and CinemaScore, the poor quality of these movies received plenty of online attention.
As useful as these websites were during the last decade, certain movies were clearly destined to fail even before the reviews started to drop due to some truly appalling trailers.
Poor writing was always at the core of said trailers. Movies with no source of intrigue or any distinctive characters were tough to promote, and in order to make up for this issue, cliché editing methods and desperate attempts at humour were often used instead. Far from being entertaining, these techniques only lessened the appeal of the film and damaged its financial prospects even further.
Ironically, plenty of these trailers featured terrific casts, but even the greatest acting talent can’t make up for flimsy concepts and dire screenplays.
Though most trailers are little more than a couple of minutes long, the worst ones of the last decade were so misjudged they were almost impossible to get through…
10. Death Note
Given the premise of Death Note, it’s no surprise the original manga series and the anime adaptation are considered to be amongst the best of their respective mediums. Netflix’s movie adaptation, on the other hand, simply wasn’t worth the time.
The first big issue with this trailer is that the story is set in America rather than Japan, and as such, the environment and the characters simply don’t feel right. Indeed, both Light and L are cliché rather than distinctive.
There’s also a lack of intrigue and suspense. The biggest selling point of Death Note is the cat-and-mouse game between Light and L. In this trailer, however, the battle between these two intellectual titans is lost beneath misplaced and mundane action sequences.
The only positive is Willem Dafoe’s performance as Ryuk, but sadly this isn’t enough to counterbalance the abundance of issues with this trailer.