Eight Awful Trailers for Very Good Movies

This seems to be happening to me more and more recently. Usually, when i’d see a bad trailer for a film, I’d skip it, but now with this job I see almost everything, and that’s resulted in a lot of pleasant surprises.

Sometimes trailers are just so poorly cut, they take a good movie and make it look terrible. Here are eight examples that came to mind, and if you have any suggestions of your own, I’d love to hear them.

1.Tangled

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyOyBVXDJ9Q

I remember seeing this first trailer for Tangled and saying wow, Disney has really gone downhill. It looked like they were just remaking over fairy tales for preteens with pop songs in the soundtrack, and  this was going to be a moronic feature.

But as it turns out, Tangled was one of my favorite films of the year, and as much a classic as any other Disney feature you remember from your childhood.

2. Minority Report

I understand that the idea of “pre-crime” is kind of hard to convey through a relatively short trailer, but at the time, this movie just looked bizarre, and everyone wondered where the hell Spielberg was going with this.  Also, John Williams is a great composer, but I’ve never heard a soundtrack that feels more out of place in a movie than it does in this trailer.

But Minority Report turned out to be a sci-fi classic, and a great film that touched on a whole host or moral issues. Never doubt Spielberg and sci-fi. Errr, except for War of the Worlds.

3. Braveheart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBXBtORI7pE

Some may argue that this movie is cheesy, and it can be in parts. Unfortunately, this trailer strings the absolute cheesiest parts all together making this movie look rather terrible. I’m sure all the talk at the time was just about Mel Gibson’s hair.

But I love this movie, cheese and all, and put together in one package without any silly voiceovers, it’s a classic.

4. Up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxMcViTf7KU

I could have picked a number of Pixar movies for this spot, as honestly, despite their quality, they don’t have very good trailers. I remember seeing this one in theaters and thinking, “an old man with a balloon house? Ok….”

But Up is one of Pixar’s most emotional features, something that didn’t come across in this trailer one bit.

5. Spider-Man 2

After the original Spider-Man was so good, I was going to see the sequel no matter what, but I was a little disconcerted when I first saw this trailer. The tone shifts about 50 times in two minutes, and Doctor Octopus looks like a rather goofy villain in his limited clips.

But this turned out to be one of the best superhero sequels ever, arguably better than the first. And Doc Ock was awesome.

6. Hellboy

If you’re unfamiliar with the comic as I was, this trailer looks like a bunch of ridiculous shit all jammed into one feature. Like League of Extraordinary Gentleman on acid.

But as it turns out, both Hellboy and its sequel are great films, mainly due to Guillermo Del Toro, who many of us weren’t as familiar with as we should be been when the first film was released.

7. 10 Things I Hate About You

I could have picked any number of chick flicks here, but I picked one that I actually like. The trailer paints this as an incredibly stupid slapstick teen dating comedy, not a rather brilliant Shakespeare adaptation with a lot of emotion.

I do like this film, and it’s strange to see Heath and JGL together in one feature, both so young.

8. Star Wars

Maybe this looked awesome at the time, but wow, is this trailer ever dated now. I understand it was 1977, but I don’t understand how anyone thought cutting a trailer like this was a good idea.

But fortunately, the rest is history.