5 Movie Trailers That Straight-Up Lied About What You Were Going To See

The Trailer Didn't Even Have A Title. That Was The Whole Point.

Paramount's teaser for Cloverfield ran in front of Transformers with no title, no monster, and no explanation — just a release date and J.J. Abrams' name attached. The entire viral campaign, from fake Slusho ads to sonar-image emails, was built around what Abrams calls the "mystery box": showing audiences everything except the one thing the movie was actually about.

It Was Sold As 'Creatures In The Woods.' It Was Actually About Grief.

The Village's trailers promised exactly what Shyamalan's previous three hits had delivered: a tense, scary thriller about monsters threatening an isolated 19th-century settlement. Instead the film spends its first half building dread before revealing the creatures are village elders in costumes, hiding a devastating story about loss — a swerve so far from the marketing that Shyamalan himself later called the ad campaign one of his biggest regrets.

The Ads Promised Pure Terror. Sam Raimi Delivered A Fart-Joke Fueled Circus.

Drag Me to Hell's marketing sold it as a no-holds-barred return to horror for the Evil Dead director, and audiences who hadn't done their homework walked in expecting straight scares. What they got instead was a gleeful, campy horror-comedy full of slapstick gross-out gags — even star Alison Lohman has said she thought she was making a straightforward horror movie until she watched it with a crowd that laughed through the bleakest scenes.

They Hid The Fact It Was A Musical. People Actually Complained To Regulators.

Sweeney Todd's trailers leaned entirely on Tim Burton's gothic imagery and Johnny Depp's razor, carefully editing around the fact that nearly the entire film is sung. When patrons realized mid-screening they'd bought tickets to a Sondheim musical, walkouts were reported and a formal complaint was even filed with the UK's Advertising Standards Agency over the misleading promotion.

It Promised To Roast Rom-Coms. It Just Turned Into One.

Isn't It Romantic was marketed as a satire that would tear apart every tired romantic-comedy cliché, with Rebel Wilson's character literally trapped inside one after a concussion. Critics at the time pointed out the bait-and-switch went the other direction too: the movie meant to mock the genre ended up leaning on the exact same formulas it was supposedly satirizing, playing it safe rather than risking a real critique.