If they’re not using the only two funny scenes in the movie to make you think the entire movie is funny, or creatively splicing scenes together to completely misrepresent the movie, they’re using scenes that don’t even make it into the movie. The New York Times once ran an entire story about how many of the scenes in the National Treasure: Book of Secrets trailer weren’t actually in the movie. (We expect more from you, Nic Cage.)
Why do the suits who market movies create trailers that have little to do with the real films? Because they’ll do anything to convince suckers like us to shell out for a ticket.
Okay, not all trailers are bogus … but these 10 sure are. Read on to find out why. And since this is the Internet, we’re contractually obligated to say this: Spolier alert
Lost in Translation
What the Trailer Promises: A wacky Bill Murray comedy in which he misunderstands Japanese people, struggles with Japanese technology, and drinks Japanese whisky. Plus, Scarlett Johannson.
What the Movie Delivers: A thoughtful movie about loneliness and desire. Plus, Scarlett Johannson’s ass in see-through underwear. How the hell did they not include that in the trailer?
The Fifth Element
What the Trailer Promises: In a future in which electronic dance music and bad haircuts reign supreme, a deadly serious Blade Runner-like sci-fi epic plays out in space.
What the Movie Delivers: An always absurd, often funny, vastly underrated twist on traditional sci-fi movies. It makes excellent use of Bruce Willis’s usual tough-guy charm and Milla Jovovich’s uncanny ability to look insanely hot while dressed like Raggedy
In Bruges
What the Trailer Promises: A Guy Ritchie-like gangster comedy full of wise-cracking criminals engaging in over-the-top violence that has little to no consequences until everything pretty much works out in the end.
What the Movie Delivers: A surprisingly complex movie about wise-cracking criminals who suffer terrible consequences due to the horror and pointlessness of violence. Case in point: Both children and midgets die!
The Rules of Attraction
What the Trailer Promises: A teen movie about college students drinking and screwing and doing drugs and generally getting themselves into lots of hijinks.
What the Movie Delivers: A demented, nihilistic, and extremely inventive story that centers around a sociopathic drug dealer played by James Van Der Beek — yes, that’s right, the guy who played Dawson. This movie should have been his breakout role, but no one went to see it because the trailer sucked so hard.
Very Bad Things
What the Trailer Promises: A wacky comedy. Five dudes have a bachelor party in Vegas that gets a little out of hand when they accidentally kill a stripper — hey, we’ve all been there. When they bury the body in the desert, hilarity ensues and they start turning against one another.
What the Movie Delivers: A profoundly depressing, dissatisfying, and unfunny movie-watching experience about very bad people doing very bad things to each other … which, to be quite honest, sounds pretty entertaining. Except in this case, you feel like kicking puppies by the end of it.
Life
What the Trailer Promises: Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence are at it again! They make Mississippi prison camps a barrel of laughs! They keep attempting ill-fated escapes! There are homosexuals in prison!
What the Movie Delivers: The movie did paint a curiously rosey portrait of two guys who were framed for murder and subsequently spent 60 years in the clink. But it’s far more dramatic and “touching” than the previews would have you believe.
The Ice Storm
What the Trailer Promises: A light-hearted drama about the ups and downs of a typical American family back in the ’70s.
What the Movie Delivers: A heavy drama. Oh, and Frodo is electrocuted.
Sweeney Todd
What the Trailer Promises: A gothic tale of revenge in which Johnny Depp plays a barber who sings during a brief dream sequence.
What the Movie Delivers: A gothic tale of revenge in which Johnny Depp plays a barber who sings pretty much constantly.
Bridge to Teribithia
What the Trailer Promises: A magitastical adventure as two youngsters come of age in a fairyland forest inhabited by all manners of mystical beast!
What the Movie Delivers: Two unhappy kids with overactive imaginations briefly imagine they live in an alternate world. Then one dies.
Punchline
What the Trailer Promises: Tom Hanks is a stand-up comic teaching Sally Field how to be a stand-up comic. It’s one joke after another!
What the Movie Delivers: A stand-up comedy movie completely devoid of humor.