8 More Movie Trailers That Blatantly Lied To You

Lies, Damned Lies, and Movies Trailers...

Megan Fox Jennifer's Body
20th Century Fox

Don’t let the glitz and glamour of Hollywood fool you; movie making is dirty work. In that ferociously competitive wasteland, cradled in the shadow of the Hollywood hills, production companies must pull out every trick to survive. It ain’t pretty, and sometimes they fight dirty in the pursuit of your delicious cash.

In fact, sometimes misleading trailers can be a big part of setting up a film for later success, by purposely misleading viewers to make twists all the more impactful.

Sometimes though, trailers just lie in attempt to purposefully trick potential viewers into seeing a less than good film they wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. On other occasions, trailers can completely miss the point of a good movie, and sell it in a way that actually puts off the intended demographic in a terrible misjudgement of the film’s character.

The long and short of all of this is that filmmakers won’t stop at telling a few fibs if it means your peachy, round buttocks into cinema seats. Let’s take a look at a few of the worst offenders.

8. Hereditary

Megan Fox Jennifer's Body
A24

What The Trailer Promised:

A horror movie revolving around a recently deceased, overbearing mother and her extremely creepy granddaughter. The trailer drops a lot of hints that the grandmother ‘isn’t gone’ and has some weird, obsessive ghostly relationship with the creepy daughter.

What We Got:

The response to Hereditary was mixed, with about 50% delighting in the curveball the movie threw, and 50% frustrated that the film they had paid good money to see was significantly different to what was advertised. The big difference was the kid, who we’d been led to believe would be the creepy centre-piece of the film, suffered a decapitation by telephone pole in the first third of the movie.

Also, the whole thing turned out to be a great deal more cult-based, demon worshipping horror than the haunting, ghostly kind of thing the trailer seemed to be getting at. Plus a lot more beheadings than anticipated. It’s still great mind you, but pretty much an entirely different focus to what audiences were promised.

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Writer, editor and presenter for WhatCulture, also a resident musician at NU. I know I'm not as funny as I think I am, please stop pointing it out...