20 Bad Trailers For Great Movies

I was watching a trailer for an upcoming film recently — I don’t need to name the movie specifically, but here’s a hint: Its title rhymes with “The Schmelectric State” — and I was struck by how absolutely dire it made its movie look.

That is rare. Most trailers look at least a little intriguing. This, after all, is their job. All a bad movie needs are 90 seconds of funny, romantic, or thrilling moments to fill out a solid trailer. I wouldn’t say making a good commercial for a bad movie is necessarily easy, but it can be done. (See this list for proof of that.)

But what about the opposite? Are there bad trailers for masterpieces? The answer is: While they are more rare than good trailers for masterpieces, or even good trailers for cinematic disasters, they do happen. It’s sort of like cooking. You can have the best raw ingredients in the world, but if you don’t prepare them in the right way, the final dish can turn into a steaming bowl of crap.

Case in point: The 20 bad trailers. Some bungle their pitch; others are downright mendacious in their attempts to obscure their films’ true nature from the ticket-buying public. A few are just plain boring!

You can see them all for yourself below. I truly hope that if I some day write a sequel to this list of bad trailers for good movies, I get to include The Schmelectric State on it.

Star Wars (1975)

For such a genre and era-defining blockbuster, the first teaser for Star Wars sure is crummy. The editing is clunky and the voiceover is downright bizarre. At one point the narrator describes Star Wars as “the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe,” which I guess is true? He also announces “somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.” Wait, right now? What happened to “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?” I guess that part came late in the edit, huh?

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Not to be outdone, some of Star Trek’s trailers through the years have been pretty rough too. I can’t think of a worse one than the trailer for Star Trek Beyond. The movie itself may be the most thoughtful and thematically coherent Trek feature that doesn’t feature the Shatner/Nimoy crew. You would never know that from the trailer though, which sells it as a pure action movie (and relies way too heavily on Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”). There’s barely any mention of the film’s villain, and zero explanation of the movie’s larger story. The title treatment — with “BEYOND” front and center first, followed by “STAR TREK” slowly appearing above it — really foregrounds the way the marketers wanted to frame this movie.

Cast Away (2000)

There’s no graver sin for a trailer in my book than giving away a movie’s ending. In the case of Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away, the trailer leaves zero doubt about what happens to Tom Hanks’ character and whether or not he escapes his isolation on a deserted island. Zemeckis supported the spoiler-laden trailer, stating publicly that he believed based on his research that “people really want to know exactly every thing that they are going to see before they go see the movie.” “People” might; I sure don’t.

What Lies Beneath (2000)

Robert Zemeckis strikes again! While What Lies Beneath doesn’t give away quite as many plot details as Cast Away did around the same time, it reveals several of the film’s big twists, including the truth nature of Harrison Ford’s character. Counter to Zemeckis’ argument, a lot of What Lies Beneath is a lot less suspenseful after you see this trailer, because you have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen and why. Which, in a mystery, kind of defeats the purpose! (The generic erotic thriller music does this one no favors as well.)

Warrior (2011)

Similarly, the trailer for Warrior, about the intertwined destinies of a pair of MMA fighter brothers played by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, ticks off every major plot point and detail of the two men’s lives and relationship except the outcome of the final fight between them. It’s admittedly a fine line to walk; how do you tell people enough about a movie to make them want to see it, without telling them too much and making them feeling they’ve seen it all without paying? For me, Warrior crosses that line.

The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

Of course, you can also make a bad trailer by withholding too much information. The Cabin in the Woods’ teaser makes the film look like a stock slasher about a group of teenagers hunted through the wilderness by a supernatural evil. The trailer never begins to acknowledge the truth that the film is a deconstruction of exactly that sort of cliché, and of horror audiences’ desire to see such rituals reenacted over and over. True, you wouldn’t want a Cabin in the Woods trailer that revealed too much. But in this case the pendulum swung too far in the other direction.

Drive (2011)

Another classic movie trailer mistake: Selling a film not for what it actually is but what you think a paying customer might want to see. The trailer for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a notorious example. It presented the movie not as a moody, atmospheric character study but as a more straightforward action thriller loaded with stunts and car chases. In fact, the trailer was so unrepresentative of the movie, that a Michigan woman sued the film’s distributor, claiming she was duped into seeing it by inaccurate marketing.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

No one sued Disney over the first Pirates of the Caribbean trailer, but it was quite similar to Drive in the sense that it only presented one side of the film to potential customers. In this case, it emphasized the action, and portrayed The Curse of the Black Pearl as a straight-forward high-seas adventure. It only briefly nods at the movie’s major supernatural elements, and barely hints at its sense of humor at all, with Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow treated as a quippy badass instead of a bumbling chaos agent. You could argue that the trailer was effective — Pirates was a massive financial hit — but you can’t say it gave a complete picture of what audiences would get when they bought a ticket.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Movie trailer editors clearly think people love water-based adventure, and don’t love anything else in movies set on the open ocean. If you saw the Master and Commander ad and never watched the movie itself, you would assume it’s this tightly focused chase film. The other half (or more) of the film that’s about the little details of sailing life and naval brotherhood in this period don’t come through at all. And those are the best parts of the movie!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Marketing execs just don’t have a lot of faith in audiences, huh? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is funny in a melancholic way at times, but I wouldn’t really describe it as a “comedy.” But its trailer sure would! It presents Eternal Sunshine as if it were yet another wacky Jim Carrey vehicle, with upbeat music, fast editing, and a heavy emphasis on moments where the cast smiles and dances. This one really misses the tone of its film.

Galaxy Quest (1999)

The reason that most people love Galaxy Quest — its razor-sharp satire of Star Trek and especically Star Trek fandom — is barely visible in the film’s trailer. If you know Trek you might pick up on the fact that the movie is riffing on that same concept. But the trailer, perhaps in an attempt to appeal to as big an audience as possible (including non-Trek fans), sells it as a much broader sci-fi comedy, with the Hollywood component kept in the background as much as possible. This looks like a bad movie, which Galaxy Quest most certainly is not.

Children of Men (2006)

Children of Men is one of my favorite movies of the 2000s. And I am pretty sure if I saw this trailer without context, I probably would have avoided the film entirely. It doesn��t capture any of the technical skill on display and, possibly to avoid making people think the movie is a big bummer (which it kind of is!) the trailer has a far more hopeful and exciting vibe than the film, thanks to weirdly uplifting background music and an emphasis on this “miracle” that Clive Owen’s character must fight to protect.

In Bruges (2008)

I’m a broken record here. You don’t want potential ticket buyers to think your movie is dark and bleak (which, in most cases on this list, it is) so you amplify just the upbeat or funny moments and sell the thing as a more conventional comedy. That’s arguably good marketing, but to me that’s not a good trailer (or, at the very least, it’s not an accurate one).

Adventureland (2009)

After writing variations of the same blurb over and over on this list, I think I have finally found the best way to describe the strategy these trailers deploy: They suggest their subjects are the dumbest possible versions of whatever concept they’re peddling in a sometimes misguided (sometimes sadly correct) belief that the dumbest possible version of an idea is the one that a mass audience wants to see. If you watch this trailer for Adventureland, and then compare it to the movie, you’ll see what I mean.

The Mexican (2001)

Here is another trailer that looks like a boring, convention Hollywood rom-com. And why not? When your movie stars Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, two of the most beautiful people alive, that’s an appealing hook for an audience. In truth, Pitt and Roberts spend most of The Mexican, something this trailer takes great pains to disguise, and a surprising amount of the story is about a lonely, thoughtful hitman played by James Gandolfini, in perhaps his best film performance.

The Fountain (2006)

To be fair, I have no idea what a “good” trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious, ponderous sci-fi film The Fountain would look like. But this would not be it. Aronofsky tells three stories in three time periods (with shared casts, including Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz) about life and death. The precise nature of the connection between them is never made entirely clear; the trailer makes it seem like they might all be happening to the same guy who is somehow an immortal, almost like he’s a Highlander who got caught in an arthouse film.

Strange Days (1995)

The Strange Days trailer starts with Ralph Fiennes looking directly into the camera and asking “Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wiretripped?” Uh, no. Wait, maybe? What do those words mean? It’s an off-putting first note; it’s meant to immediately establish the film’s futuristic trappings, but it mostly just makes you feel like you’ve walked into the theater in the middle of the movie. I like Strange Days a lot, but it is not hard to see why the film was a flop after you watch this trailer.

Bad Santa (2003)

This is another unenviable task for a trailer cutter. Bad Santa’s dialogue is roughly 40 percent profanity; almost every other word out of Billy Bob Thornton’s mouth is either an expletive or sexual slang. It’s astounding someone could piece together a two-minute trailer without any vulgarity — and if you listen closely, you’ll hear where they’ve had to snip out a few four-letter words here or there. The bigger problem is, like so many other trailers on this list, they’ve also removed most of the darker material, leaving you with the impression that Bad Santa is a wacky comedy about an incorrigible but lovable oaf. The reality is quite a bit grimmer and grimier than that.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

The notion of pitching the simplest and most accessible version of yourself in a trailer is especially true of ads for kids movies, whose target audience is admittedly not much for nuance or subtlety. This trailer for How to Train Your Dragon isn’t necessarily terrible, and it at least captures the look of the film’s animation. Still, it barely scratches the surface of Dragon’s heart or emotional story, emphasizing instead the action and goofy physical comedy for children. While the franchise is still going more than 15 years later, there’s no question the film is a far better version of How to Train Your Dragon than the one on offer here.

Frozen (2013)

Is Elsa the hero or the villain of Frozen? Based on this trailer, it’s hard to tell. Certainly it makes Anna look like much more of the central figure in the story, instead of half of a two-hander about a pair of deeply connected siblings. The trailer also mostly features a generic orchestral score instead of the famous songs from the soundtrack. (Maybe they weren’t finished at this point in the post-production process.) Either way, I would never have predicted Frozen would become one of Disney’s biggest hits in history based on this trailer. This makes it look like a flop waiting to happen.