12 Worst Marketed Movies Of 2018

6. Bad Times At The El Royale

Bad Times at the El Royale was one of 2018's most under-appreciated movies, bombing at the box office despite mostly positive reviews, and the marketing is absolutely to blame.

The big problem is that the trailers didn't really sell what the movie was - and to be completely fair, Drew Goddard's mystery thriller is not immediately packagable as a straight-up genre film.

But rather than emphasise the Agatha Christy-like set-up with a group of strangers gathered under one roof, the trailers largely focused on context-free imagery which kept more mainstream audiences firmly alienated.

Unless you're an auteur like Quentin Tarantino, you can't really afford to trade on ambiguity to this degree, and Fox was extremely short-sighted to advertise the film in such oblique terms.