10 movie trailers that outright lied to the audience
Movie marketing is an intriguing business. These days, it’s more important than ever for studios to entice audiences to leave their humble abodes and buy tickets at the cinema, because prognosticators have been predicting the death of the theatrical movie business for years.
Posters, TV adverts, merchandising, social media, and attempts to go viral have all become commonplace in movie marketing. However, I’d argue that trailers are more vital than ever in selling a film to an audience. When executed well, they can drum up fevered levels of interest. Equally, though, when executed poorly, they can kill a film’s chances of success.
What happens when trailers outright lie to the audience, though? It’s not uncommon for trailers to feature moments that don’t actually appear in the finished films or play out slightly differently than is suggested in the clip. Similarly, trailer editors and studios have been known to misrepresent the tone or style of a film they see as a tough sell in an effort to generate some extra ticket sales.
In truth, most audiences are savvy enough to know that movies are constantly evolving artefacts until they’re released, so some changes between the trailer and the finished film are to be expected. Some mistruths included in trailers go further than that, though, and can be viewed as bald-faced lies. Naturally, these instances tend to go down poorly. After all, who wants to feel like they’ve been tricked into seeing a film?
Here are 10 movie trailers that outright lied to the audience.
Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)
In 2023, a US judge threw out a lawsuit filed in 2022 when a couple of Ana de Armas fans watched Danny Boyle’s Yesterday and were horrified by what they saw. Namely, not De Armas. To their chagrin, her character had been cut out of the movie despite appearing in the trailer and selling them dreams with her “fame, radiance and brilliance”.
Michael Rosza and Conor Woulfe were incandescent with rage and filed a lawsuit for $5million. The lawsuit accused Universal Pictures of “false advertisement, unjust enrichment, and violation of unfair competition” for advertising De Armas and failing to provide said Cuban-Spanish actor.
Naturally, the judge felt this was all a little silly and dismissed the suit, telling Rosza and Woulfe that any “injury is self-inflicted” on their part. The funniest part of the whole thing, though, is that the guys didn’t even traipse to their local cinema in search of De Armas in 2019 when the movie was released. Instead, they paid a measly $3.99 to rent it on Amazon Prime three years later, somehow not realising in the intervening three years that De Armas wasn’t actually in the film.
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
The idea of a marketing team deciding to present Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive as a thrill-a-minute action movie filled with noisy car chases and relentless action is genuinely hilarious. Yes, the Fast and Furious movies are hugely popular. Yes, action movies tend to rake in more box office returns than glacially-paced character studies that favour mood and flashes of gruesome violence. But that’s exactly what Drive is, and to lead people to believe otherwise is dicey.
Naturally, when many cinemagoers who didn’t know Refn’s unique style from a hole-in-the-wall sat down to watch Drive, they got angry. And probably bored. And then disgusted. So much so, in fact, that one furious Michigan resident sued the movie’s distributor for selling her something very different from what it delivered.
A dissatisfied Sarah Deming groused that Drive “bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film, having very little driving in the motion picture”. Hilariously, though, the only thing she wanted from the entire legal case was her ticket money back.
Jurassic World: Dominion (Colin Trevorrow, 2022)
Look, Jurassic World: Dominion is an abysmal film. That much is obvious. However, it’s a film that’s aggravating, not simply because it sucks. Instead, it promised a much better movie – or, at least, a movie that more people wanted to see – in its trailer. You see, the previous film in the Jurassic World saga ended with the promise of dinosaurs finally being let loose all over the world instead of being contained to a theme park or island.
So, when the trailer seemed to show audiences a movie in which dinosaurs roamed the earth among humans and other animals, it kind of looked like Planet of the Apes, but with big, scaly prehistoric beasts. Cue a billion dollars of box office returns and excited fans hoping to get what they were promised, only for it to last an incredibly small portion of the film.
Instead, the movie inexplicably focussed on the characters from the original Jurassic Park trying to expose a conspiracy perpetrated by the shadowy Biosyn Genetics. It’s all about the evil company using genetically engineered giant locusts to eat most of the US crop supply, which in turn will help it control the world’s food supply. Yes, really. It’s just as dull as it sounds.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)
Watching the original trailer for John Hughes’ landmark 1986 teen comedy is sure to be a whirlwind of emotions for a generation that grew up on it. Look, there’s loveable slacker Ferris, his hypochondriac best buddy Cameron—who looks a lot like Connor Roy—and his little brother and sister Todd and Kimberly, who accuse him of having “syphilitic meningitis”.
But wait, you may say: Ferris didn’t have younger siblings in the movie! What gives? Well, it turns out Ferris very much did have a little brother and sister in the film’s original script. They existed alongside his sister Jeanie, played by Jennifer Grey in the movie, and evidence of them can be seen in the kiddie’s drawings that are stuck to the fridge in Ferris’s family home.
Unfortunately, both little tykes were deemed surplus to requirements when the movie was being edited, and their scenes were removed completely.
Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)
This one is an example of a studio and a filmmaker lying to the audience for a very good reason. In the first trailer for Ari Aster’s harrowing folk horror tale Hereditary, the clip does everything it can to convince viewers that Milly Shapiro’s Charlie is the newest scary and potentially murderous horror movie kid on the block.
Hell, the skin-crawling trailer was so effective that articles were published with headlines like “This creepy kid will haunt your nightmares”. It was compounded by A24 creating fun Etsy pages for Charlie’s art projects, describing her as “a girl with a penchant for arts and crafts that will haunt your nightmares”. That’s a lot of nightmares being haunted, I think you’ll agree.
It was all a genius method of misdirecting the audience, though, and priming moviegoers for having the rug pulled out from under them during the film. Charlie isn’t the main character of Hereditary, after all. Instead, her tragic death a third of the way through is actually the inciting incident for all the horrors to come. Hey, maybe lying in trailer form is OK after all?
Avengers: Infinity War (The Russo brothers, 2018)
In 2018, Marvel released the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, and comic book nerds everywhere lost their damn minds. Later, when the movie was released, they lost their damn minds all over again at the sheer geek overload that comes from seeing dozens of their favourite characters together on the screen at the same time. Only then, though, did it dawn on many of them that Marvel had told them fibs in the trailer.
For example, the trailer contains a shot of Chris Evans grappling with Josh Brolin’s Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet-covered hand – which houses fewer infinity stones than in the actual film. Well, OK, that’s pretty minor. How about the fact the trailer features Chris Hemsworth’s Thor exclaiming, “Who the hell are you guys?” to a completely different version of the Guardians of the Galaxy than is actually in the film? No?
OK, so those changes might have been ones only die-hard nerds could possibly care about. But the trailer’s biggest sin was showing the entire Avengers team running into battle in Wakanda with Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk given pride of place in the shot. In the movie, though, Ruffalo doesn’t transform into the Hulk at that point. Instead, he wears Tony Stark’s Hulkbuster armour to enable him to do battle. Lies!
Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2008)
In recent years, Hollywood has become extremely nervous about letting audiences know when movies are actually musicals. The trailers for Wonka, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Mean Girls all downplayed the musical elements of each film, seemingly in the belief that the idea of the Clown Prince of Crime bursting into song with Lady Gaga would somehow discourage people from seeing it. They weren’t the first offender for this particularly cinematic switcharoo, though.
Back in 2008, Tim Burton adapted Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street for the big screen, complete with customary parts for his muses Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. The movie was based on the classic 1970 Stephen Sondheim stage show – but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the trailer.
In fact, the advertising so successfully hid the musical numbers that a host of angry filmgoers complained, and some UK ones even pushed for Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Agency to investigate on the grounds of false advertising.
Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)
When the first teaser trailer for David Fincher’s Alien 3 was released, it was simple and to the point. As the camera panned over an image of one of the infamous alien eggs, a crack of light began to show in it. Then a moody voiceover man said, “In 1979, we discovered, in space, that no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream”.
Fans of the franchise everywhere rejoiced because this seemed to indicate the series was bringing the bloodthirsty xenomorph to our neck of the woods. Here’s the thing, though: Alien 3 is not set on Earth. In fact, there is not a mention of Earth in the film at all.
Instead, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley crash-lands on a prison planet, shaves her head, and does battle with a xenomorph alongside a colony of vicious murderers, rapists, and one charming English doctor—played by Charles Dance—who is also a murderer. In truth, the fact that Fox made a teaser for an entire movie that never came to pass is a fitting testament to the film’s unrelentingly troubled production.
Kangaroo Jack (David McNally, 2003)
Parents watching the trailer for Kangaroo Jack in 2003 probably thought to themselves, “OK, that looks like something that’ll keep little Jimmy occupied for an hour and a half.” A fun, screwball comedy about a couple of losers who meet a rapping kangaroo in the Australian outback? What’s not to love? And hey, it also implausibly stars Christopher Walken. Kids love Walken, right?
In reality, though, the Kangaroo Jack trailer and the talking CGI kangaroo was a ploy by producer Jerry Bruckheimer to milk some cash out of unsuspecting mums and dads with a movie that hadn’t exactly gone to plan.
You see, the project began life as a raunchy, foul-mouthed gangster comedy about two guys delivering money to the mob who accidentally run over a kangaroo, which then absconds with their cash. When Bruckheimer saw the trailer for Snow Dogs, though, which similarly lied about talking dogs and made big bucks at the box office, he decided to pull the same trick. Shameless.
Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010)
These days, most internet-savvy people will be au fait with the concept of “catfishing.” This is when someone creates a fake social media profile to trick someone for sinister reasons, such as defrauding them of money or destroying their love life. In fact, the term became so mainstream that MTV has been making Catfish: The TV Show since 2012, a reality series that dives into different cases of catfishing.
The show was developed by Nev Schulman, who was the subject of the original Catfish documentary from 2010, directed by his brother Ariel and Henry Joost. That film would later be accused of being a faux documentary and not genuinely the story of Nev being conned by a woman named Angela Wesselman-Pierce. Whether or not the documentary was entirely above board is kind of irrelevant, though, because its biggest lie may have come in the marketing.
The first trailer for Catfish presented the documentary as it was – until it began to suggest a very dark turn that took it into territory resembling a horror movie more than a standard documentary. In fact, the trailer suggested Nev would end up being pursued by an axe-wielding stalker of some kind, and nothing even remotely like this happened in the film.
