20 Recent Movie Trailers That LIED To You

Movie trailers have one goal above all others - get as many bodies into the cinema as possible to see the film in question. 

And so, without there being any easy legal consequences for dishonest movie marketing, studios will often bend the truth to near-breaking point in order to give their film the best chance of becoming a smash hit.

And in recent times, these 20 movies were all released following a spate of trailers that played fast and loose with the truth, whether to cynical ends or to simply preserve a surprise genuinely worth concealing.

So to be clear, not all deceptive movie marketing is necessarily bad - but even when it's hiding something that many viewers will ultimately enjoy, it's tough to blame audiences who feel they were sold a very different film from the one they ended up seeing.

For better or worse, the trailers for these movies lied to us about the content of these films, ensuring that no matter how good the reviews were, a lot of viewers ended up feeling bait-and-switched by it all...

Let's kick this list off with unquestionably the toughest-to-market movie of the year - Alejandro G. Iñárritu's daring black comedy Digger.

From the trailers, you'd understandably believe that the film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an ageing oil magnate who attempts to stop an ecological disaster he was the cause of.

However, at the end of the film's first act a shocking twist abounds - we've actually been watching a play based on the real events of Rockwell's life, which have obviously already happened, and Cruise is really playing an actor called Curtis Markson.

Yet the trailers consist only of clips from the play that Curtis is rehearsing throughout the movie, boldly concealing the real context of what we end up seeing. 

Naturally this deceptive marketing approach resulted in hugely polarising reviews from critics and general audiences alike, yet the film also wouldn't be nearly as impactful if Warner Bros. spoiled the rug-pull in their trailers.

Either way Digger was a massive box office flop, and being honest about what it was likely wouldn't have helped matters at all.