8 Devious Ways Movie Posters Trick You Into Seeing Terrible Films
1. They Completely Make-Up Critics
Most of the time quotes are attributed to their individual publications, but with some critics' names speaks bigger than their newspaper ever could. Names like Roger Ebert (such a personality that a good chunk of his fanbase will have never checked out the Chicago Sun-Times), Mark Kermode (whose rants can rack up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube) and David Manning.
Wait, who?
David Manning came when distributors realised they were twisting the words of real critics to the point where it wasn't a massive leap to just make up praise. In the summer of 2001 Manning, allegedly writing for regional paper The Ridgefield Press, gave glowing poster quotes for all of Columbia Pictures films, no matter their quality. With such gems as "The producing team of Big Daddy has produced another winner" adorning Rob Schneider's otherwise derided The Animal, people quickly realised something was up. Eventually exposed as a product of desperate executives, Sony (who own Columbia) ended up paying back the ticket cost for customers who had been duped by Manning.
If that in the end sounds like a happy ending, with the deceiving company getting their comeuppance, consider this; Sony ended up paying out $1.5 million, a fraction of what the films Manning endorsed took (they all made healthy profits), while the high-profile case has done nothing to slow the other forms of lying we've already seen.
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Which films have been the worst offenders of misleading quotes? Are there any other tricks we've missed off? Let us know down in the comments.