Honest Trailers / Tropes A to D

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#–A

• '90s Anti-Hero: Discussed in the trailer for Venom, which points out how film studios are running out of Silver Age heroes to adapt, and are thus forced to turn to these kind of heroes.
• Absurd Phobia: As a result of the mediocrity of Minions, when the The Secret Life of Pets Honest Trailer shows the appearance of one in the title card of the film, the Narrator screams in terror.
  Narrator: Why didn't you put a Minion warning on this thing? Geez!
• Accentuate the Negative: All in jest, though.
  • Lampshaded at the end of their The Dark Knight video.
    Narrator: Oh, who are we kidding? This movie was fucking awesome.
  • With Pacific Rim, the narrator starts out listing all the things about it that are absolutely ridiculous - invokedand there are many! - but eventually ends up geeking out over how much fun it is exactly because it so shamelessly panders to everyone's inner twelve-year-old.
    Narrator: Let's be honest: this movie was super dumb. But I still cannot wait for the sequel.
  • Also lampshaded in their Captain America: The Winter Soldier video.
    Narrator: Watch as Cap and two non-superheroes end up ... actually kicking a lot of ass together, in a really entertaining well-directed movie. What? We had to be honest. It's good. But since Honest Trailers is a comedy series, Get Ready. For. Nitpicking.
  • Again for the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) video:
    Narrator: [sigh] We're really reaching here. This was a fun movie.
  • This is actually averted like the plague in the Honest Trailers of Die Hard and The Empire Strikes Back, where the writers don't even want to find flaws in them:
    Narrator in Die Hard: A movie filled with amazing action, great heroes, fantastic villains, hilarious comedy, suspense, romance, excellent stunt work, a rich supporting cast, and awesome one-liners! [Beat] What, you thought we were going to crap on Die Hard? The guy's tank top is in the Smithsonian, for cryin' out loud! This movie is friggin' perfect!
    
    Narrator in The Empire Strikes Back: Witness a movie full of excellent direction, great acting, brillant dialogue, gorgeous music, and iconic moments that will stay with you for a lifetime. Hmmm, let's see what we can nitpick here... sometimes they say Han Solo's name differently. Haha, you suck, perfect movie! [sigh] This is gonna be a tough one, isn't it?
  • With Logan, while they pick at a few holes, the emotionally gripping nature of the film makes it very hard for them to actively make fun of. They try to enlist the help of Deadpool to rip into the film more, who outright refuses to mock it, declaring it a "fucking masterpiece".
• Accidental Aesop: invoked The Honest Trailer for Knives Out opens by suggesting one that applies to it and director Rian Johnson's previous movie:
  Narrator: From the director who ruined your man-childhood comes a film about how, if you act like an entitled dick, women and minorities will take away everything you ever loved. [clip of Kylo Ren acting out in The Last Jedi] No, not that one. [clip of Marta in front of her newly-inherited mansion] The new one. Aaand mute thread.
• Acclaimed Flop: invoked The Honest Trailer for The Shawshank Redemption laments that, despite the movie's many great qualities, it bombed in theaters because it ran at the same time as Speed.
• Actor Allusion: invoked
  • In The Dark Knight, Mike Engel is credited as "Rusty Griswold."
  • In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is credited as "Homeless Magneto", and Boromir as "Game of Thrones Reference."
  • In Inception, Arthur is credited as "the son from 3rd Rock from the Sun."
  • In The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman is credited as "The Prince-ASS Diaries", and John Blake as "Bruce Willis."
  • In Skyfall, Gareth Mallory is credited as "Sexy Voldemort."
  • Samuel L. Jackson gets hit with a particular case of this:
    • In Jurassic Park, he's credited as "Two-Eyed Nick Fury."
    • In The Avengers he's credited as "Mace Windu."
    • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the narrator comments that Star Wars "must have really blown his (Cap's) mind" while showing a picture of Mace Windu and Nick Fury side-by-side.
  • Les Miserabablebles credits Jean Valjean as "Fancy Wolverine", Inspector Javert as "Fat Maximus", and Monsieur Thenardier as "French Borat". Played with in the case of Helena Bonham Carter, who is credited as "Tim Burton" due to being his wife and frequent collaborator. Inverted with Anne Hathaway, who is credited as "Susan Boyle" (because she also sang "I Dreamed a Dream".)
  • In Harry Potter, Snape is credited as "Professor Hans Gruber."
  • In Forrest Gump, the stinger.
    Lt. Dan: If you're ever a shrimp boat captain, that's the day I'm an astronaut!
    Narrator: And Lt. Dan kept his word. The end.
  • In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Deadpool is credited as "Worse than Green Lantern (2011)."
  • In Breaking Bad, Walter White is credited as "Malcolm's dad."
  • In Star Trek Into Darkness, Peter Weller is credited as "RoboCop."
  • In After Earth, Jaden and Will Smith are credited as "Son of a Hitch" and "The Pursuit of Crappiness."
  • In Thor, Chris Hemsworth is credited as "Thunder From Down Under."
  • When criticizing Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance of Mr. Freeze as a Pungeon Master, they do cold-related puns of several Arnie movies, like The Punning Man, Coldman the Barbarian, Kindergarten Ice Pop, Terminator Blue, "all right, we get it."
  • In Frozen, Kristen Bell is credited as "Forgotten Sarah Marshall," and Idina Menzel as "the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem."
  • In RoboCop (1987), Clarence Boddicker is credited as "That '70s Drug Lord."
  • Several in Captain America: The First Avenger:
    • Near the start of the trailer, the narrator accidentally introduces the title character with "Meet Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. Wait, no, that's the wrong movie." Made funnier in a meta sense as in The First Avenger, the costume of the first Human Torch is on display at the expo.
    • Toby Jones/Arnim Zola is "German Capote", having played Truman Capote in Infamous.
    • And a somewhat inverted example where Dominic Cooper, who plays Howard Stark (Tony's dad), is credited as "Robert Downey, Sr."
  • The trailer for Godzilla (1998) has a stinger to Godzilla (2014) (starring Bryan Cranston) and the narrator quips "Good luck, Heisenberg!" Eventually, in the trailer for the latter movie, Cranston is credited as "Crysenberg."
  • In the trailer for the first three movies in the X-Men Film Series, Wolverine is credited as "Logan Valjean."
  • In Attack of the Clones, Count Dooku is credited as "Darth Saruman."
  • Their cast list for Love Actually is nothing but this.
    Narrator: For real, I'm telling you, that's totally Rick!
  • In Interstellar, John Lithgow is credited as "Third Dick from the Sun."
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Gamora is referred to as "Green Neytiri."
  • In the Spider-Man Trilogy trailer, Harry Osborn is credited as "Osborn, the Great and Powerful."
  • In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Colin Firth is "The Kingsman's Speech" and Mark Hamill is "Professor Joker."
  • In Mad Max: Fury Road, Nicholas Hoult is credited as "About a War Boy."
  • In Until Dawn, Josh is called "Mr. Robot", while Sam is called "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World."
  • In Fantastic Four (2015), Miles Teller is credited as "Were you stretching, or were you dragging?" while Kate Mara and Reg E. Cathey are credited as "wasted House of Cards actors."
  • In Ant-Man, Paul Rudd is credited as "I Love You Mant."
  • In Die Hard, William Atherton is credited as "That Man Has No Dick."
  • One for the Epic Voice Guy himself — upon describing the Council Spokesman of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (voiced by Jon Bailey himself) as "the world's deadliest hobo", he listens to him speak for a moment before deciding that his voice sounds actually pretty cool.
  • In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is credited as "Tonight, a Comedian died in Gotham."
  • In Watchmen, Matt Frewer (Moloch) is credited as Max Headwound.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Casey Jones is credited as "You Have Failed This Character" and Baxter Stockman as "Diary of a Mad Scientist."
  • In Wonder Woman, Queen Hippolyta is straight-up credited as "Also the Queen in Gladiator", while Antiope is credited as "Princess Cut-Her-Up".
  • In Mega Man 11, Jon straight up lampshades the fact that he voices Torch Man.
  • In XXX Franchise, Willem Dafoe is credited as "the bad guy from Speed 2".
  • The trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) claims Jim Carrey got the role of Robotnik, because he's the guy to call if you need to track down a rare animal (showing clips from Ace Ventura).
  • The Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings trailer draws some parallels to Simu Liu's biggest TV gig, Kim's Convenience.
  Narrator: Hmmm, so Shang-Chi works with cars, he's not proud of who he used to be, and he has a difficult relationship with his dad? Something about that backstory seems... convenient.
  • The Honest Trailer for No Time to Die credits Felix Leitner (Jeffrey Wright) as "Cease All Motor Functions" to a shot of him collapsing.
  • In The Princess Bride, Count Rugen is credited as "his fingers go up to eleven".
• Adam Westing:
  • The voice in the Harry Potter trailer was the actual voice from the real trailers.
  • The Honest Trailer for Terminator 2: Judgment Day notes how Arnold Schwarzenegger kept referencing it throughout his career, showing a montage of him using the memetic "I'll be back" line in other movies (as well as when he gave a graduation speech when he was Governor of California).
• Adaptation Amalgamation: The trailer for Aquaman (2018) points out how, instead of adapting 1 or 2 Aquaman stories, the producers crammed elements from just about every Aquaman story into the movie. The Narrator then wonders what they will do to top this off in a sequel.
• Adaptation Expansion: invoked
  • One of the main complaints about Batman: The Killing Joke is how it adds a lot of new scenes to the original comic, which are only there to bring it up to feature length but which don't really add anything to the story.
  • The Honest Trailer for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer points out how much the movie, which is based on a single Christmas song, adds a weird plot completely unrelated to it:
    Narrator: This is nuts! None of this was from the Christmas carol! It's just insane filler. You all turned a simple story into, like, Lord of the Rings on acid!
  • The Honest Trailer for Ted Lasso mentions that the main character came from a series of NBC sports commercials, similar to Cavemen (based on the GEICO commercials), and reminds us that, yes, that was a real show.
• Adaptation Overdosed: invoked
  • The Cinderella Honest Trailer includes posters and/or clips from nine other Cinderella adaptations, including three or four which also came from Disney.^note Ever After, The Glass Slipper, Cinderella (1997), A Cinderella Story, Another Cinderella Story, Cinderfella, Into the Woods, Ella Enchanted, and Cinderella (2015). The Into the Woods movie and Cinderella (2015) came from Disney themselves, while Cinderella (1997) premiered on Walt Disney Presents. Ella Enchanted came from Miramax back when Disney owned them, but Disney no longer owns home video rights.
  • In the Sherlock Honest Trailer, the narrator points out that Sherlock Holmes has the record for most-adapted fictional character:
    Narrator: The world's most famous detective returns, for, like, the twohundredth time.
  • The Honest Trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming notes how many Spider-Man movies we've had lately, and that we probably haven't seen the last of them:
    Narrator: Since 2002, we've had six movies,^note Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Homecoming two reboots,^note The Amazing Spider-Man Series and MCU Spiderman and three different Spider-Men.^note Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland Now, just when audiences might be getting a little sick of the franchise, Marvel swoops in to deliver a crowd-pleasing comedy that's gonna keep Spider-Man in theaters until the sun burns out of the fucking sky.
  • Whenever Honest Trailers discusses A Star Is Born (2018), the narrator throws some shade on the fact that the movie has been remade several times over the years, having previous versions in 1937, 1954, and 1976:
    • When the Honest Trailer for the 2019 Oscars discusses the film:
      Narrator: From first time director Bradley Cooper comes a film that comes along once in a generation. Literally, like, once in a generation since 1937.
    • When they make a Honest Trailers for the film itself, the narrator assumes that, since this version was a huge hit, "we're all gonna have to watch Logan Paul and North West do it again in 20 years." Then there's the parody of the song sung by Bradley Cooper's character in the film:
      Maybe it's time
      To let the remakes die
      Maybe it's time
      To let the remakes die
      
      Four remakes is a lot to take
      Hell this made my grandma cry
      Maybe it's time
      To let the remakes die
  • The Honest Trailer for Robin Hood (2018):
    • In the beginning of the video, it lists some of the many movies made about the title character:
      Narrator: Robin Hood has been Flynn, foxy, feathery, funny, and bad. Now, he's back, with an all new twist: this time, he's played by that guy from Kingsman that you like, and... nope, that's it.
    • Taken up to eleven near the end of the video, when the narrator is utterly shocked to learn that, at least before the film turned out to be a Box Office Bomb, there were six additional reboots of the character in the works, including a Maid Marian solo movie starring Margot Robbie, another titled Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon, and an apparently futuristic one called Robin Hood 2058, which the narrator admits he would actually watch.
  • In the trailer for the 2020 Oscars, the section for Little Women (2019) draws attention to the many previous adaptations of the book, including the anime.
  • The Honest Trailer for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, twice points out how this applies to Batman:
    • The opening comments on how often new Batman movies get made:
      Narrator: From the character who will be rebooted every few years until all movies are Batman...
    • After the movie title, the Honest Trailer shows how many times Batman's tragic Superhero Origin has been put to screen:
      Narrator: You've seen the story of how Batman began...
      [footage of the scene from Batman (1989)]
      Narrator: ...a lot.
      [footage of the scene from Batman Begins]
      Narrator: Okay, once more for good measure.
      [shows the scene from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice]
      Narrator: Okay, that's enough.
      [shows the scene from Joker (2019)]
      Narrator: I said enough!
      [shows the scene from Gotham]
  • The Honest Trailer for William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet mentions how the original play has been adapted hundreds of times, and draws attention to movies that were more loosely based on it.^note Gnomeo & Juliet, Life + Lyrics, Valley Girl, The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, Warm Bodies, Romeo Must Die and West Side Story
  • Because there were three high-profile adaptations of The Adventures of Pinocchio released in 2022, Pinocchio: A True Story, Disney's live-action remake of their animated movie and Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion adaptation, all three were covered in a single Honest Trailer. Said video also has a Not Starring section that lists many other, older movie and TV adaptations (and an upcoming video game).
• Adaptational Comic Relief: The Honest Trailer for Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) says that since Sokka isn't a misogynist in this version, he's purely comic relief.
• Adaptational Jerkass: The Honest Trailer for The Shining points out how in the book, Jack Torrance was a family man who slowly went insane, while in the movie he's much more of a jerk, to the point it's implied he never loved his family to begin with.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • The Honest Trailer for The Greatest Showman is mostly dedicating to pointing out (with a song!) how the real P.T. Barnum was a significantly crueler and shadier man than the version you get to see in the movie.
  • In the Honest Trailer for Captain Marvel (2019), the Narrator expresses his disbelief at how the Skrulls are not the villains of the film, but instead portrayed as innocent refugees and Nice Guys.
• Adapted Out:
  • The Honest Trailer for The Hunger Games has a "Not Starring" part that lists several parts of the novel that weren't included in the film, such as Katniss being deafened during the fight, Avoxes, and much of the books' backstory.
  • The Honest Trailers for both Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, feature Starring sections filled with lines that were (thankfully) not used in the movies.
  • The Honest Trailer for It (2017) notes some of the things that, just like in the 1990s movie, were adapted out from the original novel, and shows some disappointment that they didn't include Maturin, the God Turtle:
    Narrator: You guys made that up! No? Really? That's in there? Wow. Makes sense to cut it, but at the same time, I kinda wanna see it!
• Adorkable: invokedThey use this word verbatim to describe Anna from Frozen and Augustus from The Fault in Our Stars.
• Advertised Extra: invoked
  • For X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it's Gambit:
    Narrator: Get excited when they introduce fan favorite Gambit. Then get immediately disappointed when you realize that he is only in the movie for 5 minutes.
  • For Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Dinobots:
    Chinese Narrator: Also, there are dinosaurs at the end of this movie, but I do not wish to mislead you. They are barely in it. 5 minutes, tops.
  • One of the three endings for Furious 7 points out how the scenes featuring Hobbs in the film's actual trailers, i.e. fistfighting with Jason Statham's character, breaking the cast around his arm and firing a gatling gun, are all the scenes he's in in the movie.
    Narrator: Come on! You've got The Rock! Use him, for crying out loud!
  • The Honest Trailer for Divergent calls Mekhi Phifer, who gets a listing in the film's credits, "Mekhi Phive Minutes of Screentime" in the Starring part. The joke is repeated for the The Divergent Series: Insurgent Honest Trailer.
  • The Starring part of X-Men: Apocalypse specifically credits Angel, Nightcrawler, Psylocke and Storm as "Featured Extras", referring to how small their parts actually were in the movie.
  • The Honest Trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming credits Aaron Davis (Donald Glover) as "Technically in the Movie", which is likely a jab at how his role in the movie was fairly brief.
• Advertising by Association: They will frequently lampoon this.
  • The Honest Trailer for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace mentions that its production company, Golan-Globus Productions, previously made the notoriously crappy Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
  • The Lord of the Rings trilogy is introduced as "From the director of the King Kong Universal Studios ride."
  • Prometheus is introduced as "From the director of all those Russell Crowe movies you never saw, and the writer of Lost's unsatisfying final episode".
  • M. Night Shyamalan is introduced in After Earth as "From the director of... Oh god, not him again."
  • The Honest Trailer for Jupiter Ascending mentions that it's "from the creators of The Matrix, and nothing else worth mentioning", referring to The Wachowskis' less than stellar other films such as Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas.
  • The Honest Trailer for Entourage opens by pointing out how it kind of pales in comparison to some of HBO's more compelling dramas:
    Narrator: From the network that redefined television with shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire, comes this:
    Ari Gold: Unless Carmen Electra calls for an emergency t***y f*ck, don't answer!
  • The Honest Trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World credits director Edgar Wright as the director of the Cornetto Trilogy and "an unspecified amount of Ant-Man", referring to how Wright was replaced as director during the production.
  • The The Divergent Series: Insurgent Honest Trailer names director Robert Schwenke and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman as the director of R.I.P.D. and screenwriter of Batman & Robin, respectively, instead of movies they were credited with that were much better received, such as Schwenke's Red (2010) and Goldsman's Cinderella Man^note Which was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Screenplay and A Beautiful Mind.^note Which won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay
  • The Honest Trailer for The Force Awakens names Disney as "the company that owns everything you know and love", referring to their ownership of Marvel, Pixar and LucasFilm.
  • The Honest Trailer for Fantastic Four (2015) names director Josh Trank as the director of Chronicle and "a fantastic version of this movie you'll probably never see", referring to the infamous tweet Trank posted shortly before the movie's release.
  • The non-CinemaSins Honest Trailer for The Amazing Spiderman 2 mentions that the screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner, had previously written Star Trek Into Darkness and "A bunch of bad Michael Bay movies" (specifically, Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, and The Island (2005)).
  • The Honest Trailer for Bright notes that it was made by the director of Suicide Squad (David Ayer), the writer of Victor Frankenstein (Max Landis) and a production company called Trigger Warning Entertainment - and points out that those three might not have been the best people to try and make an allegory about race relations.
  • The Honest Trailer for Gotti lists the various companies and people behind the production, with increasing disbelief; it basically comes off less like a movie production crew and more like a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (in the worst way possible):
    Narrator: From a company limping towards bankruptcy (MoviePass), the studio behind six Bruce Willis movies in the last four years (Emmett/Furla Oasis Films),^note Vice, Extraction, Marauders, First Kill, Reprisal and Acts Of Violence Stan Lee's former business partner who he has a restraining order against (executive producer Keya Morgan), the guy in the Paris Hilton sex tape (executive producer Rick Salomon), and E from Entourage (director Kevin Connolly)?
  • The Honest Trailer for the 2019 Oscars:
    • The entry for Green Book reminds us that the director, Peter Farrelly, was previously best known for the movie with Jeff Daniels' chronic diarrhea, the movie where Cameron Diaz gets semen in her hair and Shallow Hal - and points out that he might not have been the best guy to make a movie about the Civil Rights era in the South.
    • When discussing BlacKkKlansman, they try to associate the director, Spike Lee, with some of his biggest movies, but get frustrated that the viewer hasn't seen them:
      Narrator: You've seen 25th Hour - you didn't? Okay. You've seen Malcolm X - no? Really? Yes, Denzel was great in that, you should check it out. You've seen Do the Right Thing - oh, come on! Stop rewatching Infinity War for, like, a minute! Okay, lets start over: you've heard of Spike Lee... [frustrated] Yes, the guy at the Knicks games.
  • The opening for the Mortal Engines Honest Trailer makes it out like it was directed by Peter Jackson and that the movie took ten years to make - only to then reveal that Jackson was busy making The Hobbit and so Mortal Engines was instead directed by his VFX Art Director, Christian Rivers.
    Narrator: Well, that's one more thing I can blame on The Hobbit movies!
  • During the opening of the Honest Trailer for Con Air, the narrator is surprised to learn that it has the same director (Simon West) as the Rickroll music video.
  • The Honest Trailer for Masters of the Universe lists various talented creative people who worked on the movie, like Bill Conti, the soundtrack composer of Rocky, and Anne V. Coates, the editor of Lawrence of Arabia, and laments that it probably didn't make much of a difference when the producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, were also making the infamously bad Superman IV: The Quest for Peace at the same time.
  • During the Apple TV+ segment of the Honest Trailer for "Every Streaming Service", they list some of Apple's past work - all of which is just iPhone accessories.
  • The opening of the Honest Trailer for The Kissing Booth and The Kissing Booth 2:
    Narrator: From a society that refuses to stop making movies out of fanfic...
  • The Honest Trailer for Lost notes that its creative team included the creator of Star Trek (2009), the creator of Watchmen (2019) (Damon Lindelof) and the creator of Daredevil (2015) (Drew Goddard)... and also points out the same creators' worse works (The Rise of Skywalker, Prometheus and The Defenders (2017), respectively).
  • The Honest Trailer for Money Plane credits one of its production companies, Taylor & Dodge Entertainment, as the company behind two separate Denise Richards horse movies, Adventures of Dally & Spanky and Destined to Ride.
  • The Honest Trailer for Trolls World Tour notes that the director's (Walt Dohrn) previous credits includes Shrek's Yule Log:
    Narrator: Good, good, keep being a log... And, cut! Great work, log! You're killing it today!
  • How the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road decides to credit George Miller:
    Narrator: From the director of Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City. [Beat] Wait. What?
  • The Honest Trailer for the 2024 Oscars:
    • The opening remarks on how directors winning or being nominated for the award allows Marvel Studios to credit them as such to add prestige to "their next CGI slopfest".
    • The segment for American Fiction credits the writer/director, Cord Jefferson, as "the guy who probably wrote your favorite show", referring to him having written for major TV series like The Good Place, Succession and Watchmen.
    • The segment for The Holdovers credits director Alexander Payne with having previously written "the greatest dialogue in cinema history": the dream Velociraptor saying "Alan!" in Jurassic Park III.
    • The segment for Past Lives notes how writer/director Celine Song's past achievments includes recreating the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull in The Sims 4.
    • The director of The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, is credited with directing "that one Jamiroquai video" (for "Virtual Insanity").
• Aerith and Bob:
  • The Lord of the Rings has "characters with names so complicated, only a linguist could remember them, like: [various characters address each other] Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, Sauron, Saruman, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Boromir, Faramir, Éowyn, Arwen, Gimli, son of Glóin, ISILDUR, Morgoth, Galadriel, Galas Galathan, Théodred, Grí­ma Wormtongue, Legolas, son of Thranduil ... Sam."
  • In the Starring part of Game of Thrones Vol. 3, the narrator can't help but laugh at the fact that the show has a character named Harry Strickland:
    Narrator: What kind of name is Harry Strickland in a fantasy world?! Harry Strickland sells propane and propane accessories.
• Aesop Amnesia: The non-CinemaSins Honest Trailer for The Amazing Spiderman 2 notes that it made several bad writing choices, like scenes shot for the trailer without any payoff in the movie, having way too many subplots and being too transparently desperate to create a franchise, that one of the writers, Alex Kurtzman, apparently didn't learn from at all when he got to direct The Mummy (2017), the second movie in Universal's Dark Universe, which has had many similar complaints and which Kurtzman was spearheading at the time.
• Africa Is a Country: The Honest Trailer for Mean Girls points out how the movie never bothers specifying which African country Cadie has grown up in.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles:
  • Brought up in the Splatoon trailer (the female Inkling is even referred to later as "Hentai Incoming"):
    Narrator: ...and it might be one of the most Japanese things ever, combining: seafood, dressing up like a Harajuku girl, and splattering tentacles with wet gobs of goo ... in the world's first PG bukkake simulator.
  • In the Pirates of the Caribbean trailer, the kraken is called "A Japanese Pornstar."
  • In the Pokémon Red and Blue trailer, Tentacruel is also called "A Japanese Pornstar."
  • In the Spectre trailer, the opening credits are refered to as "about three minutes of tentacle porn," referring to the octopus-heavy imagery.
• Alliance of Alternates: In the Honest Trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Epic Voice Guy has trouble coming up with any criticism for it and just starts pushing random buttons in his booth, letting in Honest Trailer narrators from other universes who join in: Epic Geek Girl (Felicia Day), Epic Dungeon Master (Matthew Mercer), the Spanish(-ish)-speaking Epic Telenovela Woman (Vanessa Gritton), and Australian Voice Guy (Mr. Sunday Movies).
• All Men Are Perverts: In the Inside Out trailer, the narrator explains that the entirety of the movie takes place inside a little girl's brain; "because if this were about a guy, it would be a porno".
• All of Them: In the trailer of Super Mario Bros. (1993), their answer to the question of invoked how much acid the filmmakers took.
• All-Star Cast: invoked
  • In the Harry Potter trailer:
    Narrator: Relive the excitement of acclaimed British thespians ... yelling nonsense.
  • The Honest Trailer for Kung Fu Panda questions the movie's choice to fill the cast with celebrity voices like Lucy Liu and Dustin Hoffman when younger viewers probably won't care. It especially draws attention to Jackie Chan playing Monkey when he only has six spoken lines in the whole movie.
    Narrator: Gestures don't count. Unless Jackie did his own stunts too. You know what, he probably did! He's such a pro.
• All There in the Manual: The trailer for The Rise of Skywalker complains how the Star Wars franchise has become extremely confusing for those that only watch the movies, since you have to follow tons of side material, like Twitter posts explaining plot points, tie-in novels and Fortnite (which had a Star Wars-centric event which provided a scene alluded to in the opening crawl), for everything to make sense.
  Narrator: Didn't know [Janna was supposed to be Lando's daughter]? It was in the Rise of Skywalker visual companion book, idiot. You should have been reading that inbetween rounds of Fortnite! Call yourself a Star Wars fan...
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: invoked
  • Their analysis of The Notebook tells them...
    Narrator: Revisit the film that reminds you that no matter how much you love each other, you're both gonna grow old and die.
  • Their takeaway from The Little Mermaid (1989):
    Narrator: If you're not happy about a contract you signed without even reading, get your fiance to murder the person who outsmarted you.
  • The real lesson we should learn from Gone Girl?
    Narrator: Don't have sex with crazy people!
• Alternate Company Equivalent:
  • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Quicksilver is credited as "The Flash" and the future Sentinels as "Ultron".
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Thanos is credited as "Darkseid".
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: The honest trailer for A Goofy Movie states that, while all teenagers think their parents are embarrassing, Max is probably the only one who is right in this regard. This is followed by a montage of Goofy dragging Max into humiliating activities or otherwise embarrassing him.
• Ambiguously Human: In the Honest Trailer for Mulan, the more animalistic attributes of the Huns (sharp teeth, fingernails like claws and yellow, beady eyes) makes the narrator wonder if they're even supposed to seem human:
  Narrator: Good Lord, Disney, these were an actual people, not the Uruk-hai!
• America Saves the Day: In Independence Day, its "message of global unity means only America can save the world."
• Anachronism Stew: The trailer for Mulan points out how Disney blatantly mixed hundreds of years of Chinese history and culture into a single setting.
• And the Rest:
  • In The Walking Dead trailer it calls the rest of the cast who are going to die as "Zombie Food."
  • In the League of Legends trailer, after naming two dozen characters the narrator calls the other hundred characters as "irrelevant".
  • In the Quantum Break trailer, the Starring part lists the main characters and just refers to the minor characters as "The sh*tty characters from the TV show parts".^note The game was a hybrid between a TV series and a videogame that let the player progress through the game and then see the consequences of their choices in the TV series episodes.
  • In the Honest Trailer for It (1990), the narrator credits the adult and child-actors who are also famous for other roles, and dismisses those that are not as "these guys" (adults) and "everyone else" (child actors).
• And You Thought It Would Fail: invoked
  • Downplayed with World War Z, which they say managed to not be "a complete disaster" despite its long and difficult production.
  • Kingsman: The Secret Service, "that left people saying 'Man, I did not expect that movie to be as good as it was'."
  • The Honest Trailer for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice describes Ben Affleck's performance as Batman as the best part of the movie despite the massive controversy that ensued when his casting was announced. It also gives similar credit to Gal Gadot for her performance as Wonder Woman.
  • Doom (2016) is described as turning out way better than the "sad last gasp for a dead series" it looked like it would become.
  • In the Honest Trailer for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the narrator is surprised that the movie turned out pretty good considering Sony Pictures' previous, less than successful attempts to start a movie franchise.
    Narrator: Is... is this what hope feels like?
  • The Honest Trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves opens by marveling at how it turned out surprisingly good:
    Narrator: In a world of high fantasy, low comedy, and special effects wankery, a big-studio adaptation of a beloved nerd franchise will turn out... not awful? Kind of fun? Actually funny?! Okay, lock the doors; nobody's leaving until we figure out how this happened!
• Angrish: From the Home Alone trailer.
  Narrator: ...and Harry, who sounds like Joe Pesci trying not to curse in a PG movie.
• Angst Aversion: invoked The Honest Trailer for the 2021 Oscars describes The Father, in which Anthony Hopkins plays an old man whose mind keeps slipping due to dementia, as being so heartbreaking that the viewers of the video probably passed on it because of how depressing the last year was.
• Angst? What Angst?: Invoked in the Honest Trailer for Thor: Ragnarok in regards of Bruce Banner's state after the events between Avengers: Age of Ultron and this film:
  Narrator: Where Bruce Banner awakens to find he spent the last two years of his life as an enslaved killing machine, and take all of nine minutes to get over it.
• Animals Lack Attributes:
  • The last question the Narrator asks in the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes trailer is, "Um, how can I put this... Where are all the monkey dicks?"
  • He also questions the lack of genitals and anuses of the Zootopia inhabitants:
    Narrator: [...] and form a sort of romance that sadly they'll never be able to consummate. Not 'cause I'm speciesist or anything, it's just that nobody in this movie has any genitals, or... you know... a butthole. Seriously, how does anybody go to the bathroom in this place?
  • He seems to regret it by the time of the Honest Trailer for The Secret Life of Pets, as in it he asks if it was necessary for the movie to avert this by giving the cats detailed anuses.
  • While he also praises the design of Trico in The Last Guardian for its realism, he thinks it was excessive to give the character model a perfectly rendered anus.
    Narrator: At least I didn't have to climb on this thing's dong, I guess.
  • In the Honest Trailer for Kong: Skull Island, the narrator is about to point out King Kong's lack of a "ding-dong", but Jordan Vogt-Roberts points out how they already did that in the Honest Trailers listed above.
• Anti-Climax Boss: invoked
  • While the Honest Trailer for John Wick is very positive about it, it thinks the final fight scenes were a bit lackluster since it had him kill Petyr without much of a fight and then take on his father, an out-of-shape old man, in a fistfight.
    Narrator: Huh. Kinda feels like they blew their budget in that nightclub scene.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier expresses disappointment that Karli, after having served as an antagonist for the series, is killed by just a few gunshots.
• Anvilicious: invoked Pointed out in Avatar.
  Narrator: Together, they'll learn: "Military = bad. Trees = good."
  • And the remastered version trailer nicknames it "James and the Giant Preach".
• Anyone Can Die:
  • In Breaking Bad, "get ready for a show where anyone can be killed at any time, and in any way, from boxcutter, to bike lock, to ATM machine, to decapitated-head turtle bomb, to exploding grandpa, to Jimi Hendrixing, to Pontiac Aztek. Now that's Product Placement."
  • Also in Game of Thrones, whether you're Sean Bean, Sean Bean's wife, Sean Bean's best friend, Sean Bean's son, Sean Bean's daughter-in-law, Sean Bean's family dogs, or Sean Bean's unborn grandkid.
    Narrator: All men must die...who are in any way close to Sean Bean!
  • From The Walking Dead Season 1-3:
    Narrator: Together, they'll travel with a cast of supporting characters, like T-Dog [shows T-Dog getting eaten by a zombie]...oh, okay, then Merle [shows Merle getting shot by The Governor]...Andrea? [the sound of Andrea getting shot] Dale? [shows Dale getting shot] Zombie Shane? [shows Carl shooting a reanimated Shane] Sophia? [shows Rick shooting Sophia] Amy? [shows Amy getting eaten by a zombie] Milton? [Milton gets murdered] Those prison dudes? [shows Axel, Big Tiny, Andrew, Tomas, and Oscar are killed in various ways] Anyone? [shows other characters being killed by zombies] Man, the actors on Game of Thrones have better job security.
  • The Honest Trailer for Season 4-6 of The Walking Dead notes how the series has gradually given up on this, going from a series that allowed any character to die, to one that allowed any supporting character to die, to one where seemingly nobody can die, "even if they're (Glenn) clearly eaten by a massive herd of fricking zombies".
  • The Honest Trailer for The Last of Us (2023) lampoons how a lot of supporting characters die throughout the series:
    Narrator: Wow, they really are the last of us. You know HBO means business when they kill off a nepo baby^note Nico Parker, daughter of Thandiwe Newton in the first episode.
• Anything but That!: The narrator more or less groans throughout the entire After Earth trailer from the very start.
• April Fools' Day: On April 1 2020, an Honest Trailer was released for the then non-existent (though heavily demanded) Justice League (2017) - The Snyder Cut (which later was made for real).
• A Rare Sentence: In the Honest Trailer for Mortal Engines, the narrator at one point talks about how the main character's undead cyborg dad keeps saying her name, and shortly afterwards stops to realize that he just said "undead cyborg dad", and that he even narrates the movie's opening.
  Undead Cyborg Dad!Narrator: This movie is ridiculous.
• Arc Fatigue: invoked
  • In the Honest Trailer for Birds of Prey (2020), the narrator laments that Harley and the other team members don't all team up until over an hour and 20 minutes into the movie.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Rock points out how the first half of the movie feels like its own separate movie about Goodspeed and Mason teaming up, followed by the second half where the mission to infiltrate Alcatraz begins.
  • The Honest Trailer for Iron Fist (2017) complains about its slow pacing, with characters spending a lot of time preparing for later action, Danny being vague for no good reason, invokeddrawn-out scenes with uninteresting meetings and lines and plot points being repeated to the audience.
  • The Honest Trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) remarks on how much time the subplot with Tom attending his sister-in-law's wedding at Hawaii takes up and how much attention it's given; it goes on for so long that the video basically gives it two mini trailers called Sonic 2: Rivals Down the Aisle and Sonic 2: Rivals Down the Aisle: Chaos Altar.
    Narrator: Wait, what? This part is still going?
    [...]
    Narrator: All right, are we done here? Can we please go back to the Sonic part now?
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • Avatar takes us to a futuristic world of spaceships, mech warriors, and... really crappy wheelchairs?
  • When doing the casting list in Inception, the cast list ends with Cobb's dreidel.
  • In Skyfall, their description of Raoul Silva: "An antagonist with a plan so complex, he wants to get caught, but makes it nearly impossible to find him; knows months ahead of time the exact place to plant explosives during a chase he didn't even know was going to happen; and.... makes Bond gay."
  • Also from Skyfall, "When Bond returns to the high stakes world of espionage, he is faced with: word association [Bond taking his Word Association Test], office politics [Gareth Mallory talks to M], art theory [Bond and Q looking at a painting], Judi Dench frowning; a lot (cue every single close-up shot from the film of M with a frowny face), and absurdly long landscape shots."
  • Indiana Jones: "He discovered the Lost Ark. He conquered a Temple of Doom. He defeated an Army of Evil. And now.... he's looking at a gopher."
  • The Lord of the Rings trailer features a montage of people saying each other's really complicated names finishing with... Sam.
  • In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, "watch as Wolverine's centuries of war are glossed over in one montage, to instead make time for things no one wants to see Wolverine do: go on dates [shows shot of Logan caressing Kayla Silverfox], chop wood [Logan cutting a tree down with a chainsaw], get stuck in traffic [Logan and Kayla's truck coming up on two stopped cars, and Logan laying on the horn], and fumbling around in the bathroom."
  • If you watch Les Miserables, in their words, you will:
    Experience over two-and-a-half hours of CGI crane shots
    And extreme close-ups
    And the death of Russell Crowe's acting ability.
  • The Harry Potter trailer: "Relive the excitement of acclaimed British thespians yelling nonsense, battles that would have been way cooler with lightsabers or if they just moved around a little, and Rupert Grint's dumb face."
  • The trailer for The Last of Us lists the horrific sights in the game as including "torture, suicide, Pittsburgh, dead children, more torture, more dead children, and the ultimate horror of leaving your best friend hanging."
  • The trailer for The Walking Dead describes it as taking place in a world where humanity goes back to riding horses, fighting with crossbows, and driving the fully loaded 2012 Hyundai Tucson.
  • The trailer for Halloween (1978) lists of Loomis' crimes as: Not following the Hippocratic oath (he tries to kill his patient), messing up Michael Myers' face at some point during their therapy sessions, and.... parking in the cripple spot. Naturally, the narrator takes most offense to that last one.
  • Invoked at the end of the Batman Begins trailer:
    Henri Ducard/Ra's al Ghul: We sacked Rome. loaded trade ships with plague rats. Burned London to the ground.
    Epic Voice Guy: (over Ra's still talking) Cancelled Firefly, made Crash win Best Picture, discovered Justin Bieber, made Harambe a meme...
• Artistic License – Biology: The Narrator's rant at the end of the After Earth trailer includes, among other complaints, yelling about the eagle that dies from the nightly cold despite natural selection meaning that should have rendered its species extinct by now.
  Narrator: It hasn't figured out how to live in the cold over the last thousand years of being an eagle?!
• Artistic License – Medicine: The Honest Trailer for Pocahontas questions the logic of sending John back to England via ship to treat his gunshot wound instead of treating him on site, considering he'd most likely die long before the ship crossed the Atlantic.
  Narrator: Is anyone gonna tell him?
• Artistic License – Physics: In Fast Five, "refuel and ride along while these rebels break every law in the book: of physics, gravity, weight differential, and friction."
• Artistic License – Sports: The Honest Trailer for Space Jam notes that the basketball game the movie leads up has an egriously lazy and arbitrary adherence to actual basketball rules:
  Narrator: Thrill at one of the worst referreed games of basketball since the ref in Air Bud let a dog on the court, with dozens of flagrant fouls, shady scorekeeping, and a blatant disregard for solid fundamentals.
  Marvin the Martian: But if you don't find a fifth player, your team will forfeit the game.
  Narrator: Oh, now you care about the rules?! Where were you when the two players in the Toon Squad shot a Mon-Star in the face?
• Art-Style Dissonance: The trailer for Team Fortress 2 points out how it blends Pixar-esque animation with gory, bloody, heads-blown-off violence.
  Narrator: See? This is what Toy Story was missing.
• As You Know: In the Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) Honest Trailer, the narrator complains that Zuko is telling Iroh about his search for the Avatar even though Iroh was with him the entire time.
• Ascended Extra: The Honest Trailer for WandaVision comments on how few significant moments Wanda and Vision had together in the previous entries in the MCU before getting their own show and how little interest the audience had in them as a couple:
  Narrator: You said "huh" when they bonded over their vaguely defined superpowers. You said "oh, okay" when they dated for two years off-camera. And you thought "welp, I guess that's over" when this happened:
  [footage of Thanos killing Vision in Infinity War]
  [...]
• As Himself: What they see Leonardo DiCaprio in the The Wolf of Wall Street as.
  Narrator: Leonardo Dif***ingCaprio stars as a f***ing young hot rich guy who hangs out on f***ing yachts and has sex with f***ing models. Basically Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Asian Rudeness: The trailer for Transformers: Age of Extinction is taken over by a Chinese woman two thirds of the way through, who dismisses the narrator with a "Thank you, large American trailer man." ("Hey!")
• Asian Speekee Engrish:
  • In reference to the "Leo Squint" meme, they introduce Inception's star as "Reonardo DiCaprio".
  • Ken Watanabe's accent makes it really difficult for them to understand exposition from him.
• Ask a Stupid Question...:
  • This bit from the Honest Trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey:
    Ana: What are butt plugs?
    Narrator: It's a plug. For your butt.
  • When Deadpool shows up in the trailer for his own movie.
    Narrator: Holy crap, Deadpool?
    Deadpool: No, it's Rhythm Nation-era Janet Jackson. Yeah, I'm motherf*cking Deadpool!
  • And he does it again for Deadpool 2!
    Narrator: In a World… where—
    Deadpool: Wait, wait wait wait wait wait. Hold the door, hit the brakes, cut.
    Narrator: Deadpool?!
    Deadpool: No, it's Banksy. Would you like to buy a painting?
• Aspect Ratio Switch: The Honest Trailer for Zack Snyder's Justice League, when showing the "Honest TV Trailers" title card, switches to a 4:3 aspect ratio with black blocks on the left and right sides of the screen in reference to the movie being formatted that way on HBO Max (due to the movie being formatted for IMAX despite being intended for a streaming service release).
• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: invoked The Honest Trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder attributes the movie's low quality to its director, Taika Waititi, being busy with countless other projects while making it, like a new Star Wars movie, two animated series based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Netflix and a Flash Gordon movie.
• Audience-Alienating Era: invoked
  • Whenever a Batman movie is the subject of an Honest Trailer, they tend to describe any movies not directed by Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan as this. The Honest Trailer for Batman Begins sums it up:
    Narrator: After Joel Schumacher made Batman silly, but before Zack Snyder made him a joke...
  • The Honest Trailer for the Blade Trilogy notes how, before it was made, movies based on Marvel properties were either direct-to-video flops (Captain America (1990), The Punisher (1989)), unreleased invokedcult movies (The Fantastic Four) or "whatever Howard the Duck was".
  • The Honest Trailer for the Donkey Kong games describes the N64-Gamecube era of the games as this overall due to Nintendo trying out several different genres (some of which they note were still pretty good), such as the adventure Platform Game Donkey Kong 64 and the kart Racing Game Diddy Kong Racing, and games that used the bongo drum controllers.
  • The Honest Trailer for Pocahontas describes how it followed some of Disney's biggest hits and kicked off a decade of more mediocre movies like Chicken Little and Home on the Range.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Galaxy Quest notes how its premise was probably a bit too specific to appeal to a general audience:
    Narrator: Suit up for a big-budget, sci-fi metacomedy about niche fandom in The '90s. Wow, it's like they were trying to lose money.
  • The Honest Trailer for the 2020 Oscars suggests that Parasite (2019) will have trouble appealing to a broader American audience:
    Narrator: Get ready for a Korean film about class- Aaaand you just stopped listening. Look, you only have to watch one foreign film a year, okay?
  • When the narrator recaps some contested major plot points from Cruella, including her mother killing her adoptive mother with dalmatians and Cruella being responsible for Pongo and Perdita, who are siblings here, getting together, the listener is heard walking away.
• Audience Participation:
  • Viewers' requests for films are featured before each video. And viewers can leave comments with phrases for the narrator to say in his awesome voice.
  • In anticipation of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Screen Junkies released two Honest Trailers, one for Batman (1989) and one for Superman: The Movie, and let fans vote on what Honest Trailer should be made next based on the number of views each Honest Trailer got. The winner became Superman, leading to the next Honest Trailer being Superman Returns (the Honest Trailer that had been promised if Batman had won, Batman Begins, eventually got an Honest Trailer anyway).
• Audience Surrogate: In the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire trailer, the narrator introduces Katniss as "A Totally Average Down-to-Earth Girl... Just Like You!"
• Author Appeal: invoked The Honest Trailer for "Every Quentin Tarantino Movie" has a two minute music video pointing out his foot fetish playing over countless scenes of women's bare feet or shots prominently featuring feet from his movies.
• Author's Saving Throw: invoked
  • Subverted in the Honest Trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which notes that the film made some changes in response to complaints about the previous movie, such as putting the Turtles in a more central role than the human characters and bringing in fan favorite characters like Bebop and Rocksteady, but still turned out bad.
  • Also subverted with Suicide Squad, which they say was expected to bring the DC Extended Universe back on track after their last movie got a very mixed reception, but turned out pretty crappy anyway.
  • Subverted yet again with Ghost in the Shell (2017), which the Honest Trailer notes responded to the accusations of whitewashing caused by the casting of Scarlett Johansson by making the futuristic Hong Kong setting more multicultural, with many residents of other ethnicities besides Asian, and making it clear that the android body Johansson plays holds the brain of someone else. Unfortunately, the creators wound up shooting themselves in the foot by making said brain that of a Japanese person.
  • The Honest Trailer for Wonder Woman notes how it didn't repeat the mistakes of the previous films in the DC Extended Universe:
    Narrator: From the studio known for confusing length with depth, complexity with intelligence and self-absorbed downers with heroism, the DCEU pulls off its biggest success yet by... not doing those things.
  • The Honest Trailer for Thor: Ragnarok praises it for trimming off what's described as "dead weight" in the previous Thor movies, such as Jane Foster, the Warriors Three and even Asgard.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Happens with both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Narrated by the regular epic voice guy, who loves Star Wars and considers those films an Even Better Sequel, and the original voice guy, who loves Star Wars and considers that They Changed It, Now It Sucks! Each comment is praise from the former that gets refuted by a complaint from the later. At the end of the video, however, they realize their most and least favorite scenes were exactly the same, and become BFF. After all, they are both self-confessed Star Wars nerds.
• Award Snub: invoked
  • The trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street points out Leonardo DiCaprio's inability to win an Oscar several times, complete with a montage that lists everyone and everything that somehow managed to win an Oscar before Leo.
    Narrator: And... Leonardo NoOscaro. Which is crazy when you think about all the other people who have Oscars, like... Three 6 Mafia^note Best Original Song for "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp", the theme song of Hustle & Flow, Al Gore^note Hasn't been personally awarded with an Oscar, but An Inconvenient Truth won Best Documentary, Features and Best Original Song, which went to director/producer Davis Guggenheim and Melissa Etheridge, respectively, Cuba Gooding Jr.^note Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Jerry Maguire, Dean Pelton from Community^note Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay for co-writing The Descendants with Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon... [goes on for a long while, before culminating with...] ... and the movie, Crash
    Leonard DiCaprio: Goddammit!
  • The Honest Trailer for The LEGO Movie tells how the movie, despite being incredibly successful financially and beloved by critics and audiences alike, failed to even get nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars in favor of "things no-one saw" like Song of the Sea and The Tale of the Tiny Hand Princess.
  • Inverted with Pearl Harbor. Among its crimes the Narrator lists, he laments that it won Michael Bay an Oscar... for Sound Design. Cue a clip show of Ben Affleck's character opening a wine bottle with a comically fake "pop!".
  • Also inverted with La La Land in the Honest Trailer for the 2017 Oscars, which lists the many nominations the movie had earned with increasing disbelief, eventually questioning its two nominations for Best Song ("Did nobody watch Sing Street?") and especially its nomination for Best Costume Design:
    Narrator: What the- They're just wearing clothes!
  • The Honest Trailer for the 2020 Oscars ends with a long list of all the films the narrator believed were worthy for a nomination, but didn't get a single one.
  • The Judas and the Black Messiah entry in the Honest Trailer for the 2021 Oscars, while agreeing that the movie is worthy of the Best Picture nomination, laments that Spike Lee was snubbed for Da 5 Bloods, which stings especially considering that Judas and the Black Messiah's director, Shaka King, was a student under Lee. The title also calls out the Academy for not at least nominating Delroy Lindo for his performance in Da 5 Bloods.
    Narrator: You do know you can honor more than one black director at a time, right?
  • The Honest Trailer for Everything Everywhere All at Once expresses disappointment that Jamie Lee Curtis got the Best Supporting Actress Oscar instead of Stephanie Hsu:
    Narrator: And [Hsu] co-stars as their daughter Joy, a character whose complex journey takes her to the edge of madness and back, playing both a teenager struggling to connect with her mom, and an omnipotent nihilist seeking to destroy the universe. So of course she lost the Oscar to [Curtis] as a mean lady with a funny voice. Let's just pretend this was a make-up for True Lies.
• Awesome, but Impractical: They poke fun at Pacific Rim for the weapons on the Jaegers.
  Narrator: [Gipsy Danger] comes equipped with: ineffective elbow rockets, painfully slow plasma cannons, and an incredibly powerful sword they forgot they had until about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

B

• Backhanded Compliment: invoked The Honest Trailer for Mortal Kombat: The Movie and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation admits that the horribly animated monsters look pretty good... for a Sega Genesis game.
• Back to Front: Just like the movie it riffs on, the Honest Trailer for Memento is told in reverse chronological order (with the exception of the comment reading, which is done at the end like always). (But you can also watch the chronological version)
• Badass Decay: invoked
  • Their opinion of the Weeping Angels in the Honest Trailer for Doctor Who (Modern):
    Narrator: [...]killer stone statues who get less threatening with every appearance, until they're about as scary as Ghostbusters II.
  • The Honest Trailer for Hawkeye (2021) is not very impressed by the new portrayal of Kingpin, between the Hawaiian shirt outfit he wears instead of the usual suits and the fact that he gets defeated by every main character he goes up against.
    Narrator: I'm not saying the return of the Netflix characters has been a dud so far, but Danny Rand just changed his Facebook invite from "Going" to "Maybe".
  • The Honest Trailer for The Book of Boba Fett opens by listing past times in the franchise that well-liked characters became less cool when their backstory was expanded, like Han Solo in Solo and Anakin in The Phantom Menace, and laments how the show has had the same effect on Boba Fett.
  • Whenever Dr. Strange is brought up after Avengers: Endgame, Honest Trailers tend to describe him this way:
    • The Honest Trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home says Dr. Strange has "been replaced with someone more like Dr. Oz", referring to how often the character gets beaten by Spider-Man and other characters despite his great magic powers.
      Narrator: If he turns out to be a Skrull, I'm gonna be so pissed/pleased with myself for calling it.
    • Brought up again in the Honest Trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which remarks on how Strange has gone from being powerful enough to hold off Thanos to being outdone by his own cape and getting killed in a lot of different iterations.
      Narrator: See, this is why my top 3 Dr. Strange movies are Avengers 3, Spider-Man 3 and Thor 3.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The Honest Trailer for Planet of the Apes (2001) opens with the narrator thinking it's for the 1968 original:
    Narrator: From 20th Century Fox comes a landmark of science fiction filmmaking, that's still one of the most shocking movies ever mad- Wait, we're doing the Tim Burton version? [sighs] Let's just get this over with.
  • In the Watch_Dogs Honest Game Trailer, we are shown a barrage of requests for Batman: Arkham Knight, then the narrator comments, "We got it on PC, and it still doesn't work. So... maybe next week?" Then, a single request for Watch_Dogs appears, the narrator decides that they're "Close enough," then starts narrating on the latter.
  • From The Mummy (2017) Honest Trailer:
    Narrator: What is dead may rise again, and the cast cannot stay buried for long. So when Universal Studios needed a cinematic universe, they dug up the rotted, bloated corpse of... The Mummy.
  • There is also a subcategory of this in some Honest Trailers mixed with a bit of Backhanded Compliment where a critically praised movie is complimented for several aspects of it before the trailer describes it as a more questionable genre:
    • Gone Girl is described as "the best acted, coolest looking, most well-written Lifetime movie ever made."
    • Jaws is described as "the best directed, well cast, masterfully scored cheeseball B-Movie ever made."
    • Jurassic World is described as "the box-office smash of the summer", only to immediately state that it's "just the most expensive Syfy Channel Original Movie ever made."
  • The Honest Trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) does this twice:
    • First, regarding how complaints of how the previous movie didn't have a lot of Godzilla in it, leading to the sequel being overpacked with scenes of kaijus fighting.
    • Second, when the narrator complains that said kaiju fight scenes are poorly lit and wants to see more Godzilla fights in daylight - and immediately changes his mind when he sees the hilariously bad flying kick scene from Godzilla vs. Megalon.
  • The Honest Trailer for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial focuses more on comparing how much of a blatant rip-off Mac and Me is. They come clean at the end and apologize for the ruse, and admit that ET is too perfect to rip apart, but still portray both movies in the Starring segment.
  • The Honest Trailer for Lost opens by pointing out how it turned out similar to another show created by a member of the show's creative team:
    Narrator: From creator J. J. Abrams comes an iconic turn-of-the-century pop culture sensation, featuring a first season that had viewers wondering "what's in the box?!", and a time-travelling final season that left most fans disappointed and confused... Felicity! [Beat] Oh, and also Lost. Wow, J.J. did that twice? How does that even happen?
  • One trailer starts with requests for The Batman (2022). An air leak makes the Epic Voice Guy need something dumber to keep his brain not so active while it's starved for oxygen. Cue the requests being changed for ones for Moonfall.
  • The Honest Trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania says it's brought to you by the guy who did Back to the Future... The Ride.^note Reed was the writer of the ride
• Bait-and-Switch Comparison:
  • In Batman & Robin:
    Narrator: In a world full of crime, [shows montage of Mr. Freeze clips] one man is determined to kill Batman once and for all. His name... is director Joel Schumacher.
  • In Attack of the Clones:
    Narrator: Ewan McGregor is forced to [shows montage of Obi-Wan Kenobi in scenes with CGI aliens] try and act alongside lifeless and emotionless computer characters like Hayden Christensen.
  • In Jaws:
    Narrator: People are dying on Amity Island, and only one monster is to blame: the town mayor.
  • The Honest Trailer for Moana opens with one:
    Narrator: Are you ready for a new kind of Disney Movie, full of strong female characters, no forced romantic subplots, and a celebration of Polynesian culture? Then you'll love... Lilo & Stitch!
  • The Honest Trailer for Elvis (2022) compares Elvis' manipulative, deceptive manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) to the movie's director:
    Narrator: Watch this carny swindler never let the truth get in the way of a good story, sand the edges off Elvis to make him more palatable, and snow-job the audience with a shallow spectacle while milking them and Elvis for every penny. Ohhh, so it's a Baz Luhrmann biopic, too! Got it. Got it.
• Based on a Great Big Lie: During the Honest Trailer for Bloodsport, the narrator can't even keep a straight face while trying to claim that the movie was based on a true story before pointing out how the real Frank Dux's claims either couldn't be verified or were directly contradicted by records.
• Bat Deduction: The Honest Trailer for National Treasure pokes fun at scenes where Ben Gates solves riddles in the movie through a lot of wordplay, intercut with scenes of Batman doing the same with the Riddler's riddles in Batman (1966), resulting in the narrator going down a similar train of thought leading to a conspiracy theory about the COVID pandemic.
• Beat Without a "But": Happens in the Honest Trailer of Justice League (2017) when the narrator describes the heroes of the film.
  Narrator: The Batman. He may not be that tough, or that smart, or that careful with his secret identity, but... Wait, there is no "but"? That's a shame, he was the best part of the last one.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: In the Arcane trailer, the narrator says that the show goes all in on the trope of making everyone good hot and everyone bad physically deformed and proceeds to show some examples of conventionally attractive good characters and ugly evil characters.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • The Honest Trailer for Kong: Skull Island points out how Tom Hiddleston's character, James Conrad, "always looks perfect" despite being a Vietnam veteran-turned-mercenary in the 70s who is slogging through a jungle fighting monsters.
  • The Honest Trailer for Mortal Engines wonders why everyone in the cast is so attractive even though the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world.
    Narrator: Where are my pasty subterranean cannon fodder at?
  • The Honest Trailer for Hawkeye (2021) remarks that Clint and Kate should both have much worse facial injuries than they do considering how much violence they suffer.
    Narrator: Are we sure they don't have healing powers?
• Best Known for the Fanservice: invoked
  • Titanic (1997)'s re-release allows a new generation to "remember the excitement of PG-13 boobs, now in James Cameron-approved 3D."
  • Emma Watson as Hermione is mentioned as Harry Potter's "superior in every way hot lady friend" and is credited as "Your First Erection".
  • Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow is credited as "Hawkeye with BEWBS" in the Iron Man 2 trailer and as "Leather BEWBS" in The Avengers trailer. This got better afterwards, with their Iron Man 3 trailer crediting her as "Black Widow" (in the "not starring" part), the Captain America: The Winter Soldier trailer credited her as "Lucy," and the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer crediting her as "Good Luck Finding Her Action Figure."
  • The infamous scene of Caroline Marcus (Alice Eve) in her underwear is credited as "Thumbnail" in the Star Trek Into Darkness Honest Trailer, referring to how often it was used for thumbnails of videos related to the movie on YouTube. It could also be a reference to how Honest Trailer itself tends to use fanservice-y thumbnails for films/TV series that have particularly memorable fanservice.
  • In the NieR: Automata trailer, the narrator mentions how memorable 2B is for her "bigger android butts" and "thick, thick robo-thighs".
    Narrator: Okay, now I get why the internet likes this one.
  • The Bayonetta trailer gets as much mileage of this as possible. Just see all the Freudian Slips below:
  So cock those high heels and get ready to climax in a titillating experience that will leave your aroused with some of the breast combat around and action that will erect a timeless monument in gamers' memories. I guess what I'm trying to say is BEWBS.
  • The narrator even does with male characters, with "hot guy" being used to describe many characters including Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, and Frozen's Kristoff and Hans.
  • Subverted with Fifty Shades of Grey. The narrator says that, while people were hoping for the steamy sex scenes from the book, they were mostly treated to:
    EMAILS
    TEXTING
    CONTRACTS
    CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS
    etc.
    AND... TENDER MISSIONARY LOVEMAKING. What the fuck? Let's get kinky weird!
  • Similarly, Fifty Shades of Grey's sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, is noted to only have roughly ten minutes' worth of sex scenes despite being two hours long. It's also pointed out that in all but one of those scenes, Christian Grey's pants stay on, for some reason.
  • Also subverted with the Honest Trailer for Eternals, which draws attention to how the movie's sex scene, the first one ever in the MCU movies, is both brief and fairly tame, and how Kumail Nanjiani doesn't show off the abs he built up for the movie despite showing them on social media.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: The Frozen trailer describes "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People" as the movie's "other romantic duet" (after "Love Is an Open Door"). Just like the trailer redubs "Love is an Open Door" to sound like it's about intercourse, the same treatment is given here:
  Narrator: I'm kinda turned on by reindeer...
• Better on DVD: invoked
  • Inverted with Doctor Strange, the Honest Trailer of which points out that the awesome special effects are best enjoyed in 3D on a giant screen, but watching it on a smaller screen in 2D isn't as impressive.
  • Similarly inverted in the Honest Trailer of Mulan (2020), which laments that the movie's vibrant colors and beautiful landscapes will be wasted on a smaller TV at home.
  • Likewise inverted in the Honest Trailer of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which points out how a lot of surprising scenes are clearly drawn out in anticipation of applause in movie theaters, but feel really awkward when watched alone on a TV.
• Betty and Veronica: The Honest Trailer for Season 2 of The Witcher (2019) describes Triss and Yennefer as this to Geralt, saying Triss is "the sweet nerdy girl who always comes in second to Geralt's chaotic goth ex".
• Big "NO!": In the Honest Trailer for Tattletail, this is the Narrator's reaction to the fact that he has to do yet another Honest Trailer for a low-budget, indie horror game.
• Bizarro Episode: invoked The Honest Trailer for Honest Trailers (Written by a Robot), which was written by a bot created by Botnik Labs, which had previously created a Harry Potter fanfic using an algorithm to generate the chapter automatically. It gets weird.
• *Bleep*-dammit!:
  • The second f-bomb used in the The Dark Knight's honest trailer goes (inadvertently?)^note It was used at the end when the announcer gave up trying to criticize the film and calls the film "fucking awesome" in the process. uncensored.
  • The Team America: World Police trailer shows Alec Baldwin saying "That is the F.A.G. way" with "F.A.G." bleeped out right after showing the Film Actors Guild's logo uncensored.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The honest trailer for Spider-Man (Japan) mocks the often poorly translated monster names and episode titles in the subbed version.
• Boom, Headshot!: The Starring part of the Honest Trailer for John Wick includes the many, many headshots in the movie.
• Both Sides Have a Point: The Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer describes how divisive the film was, but notes that Batman's warehouse fight was cool, and Batman and Superman's conflict ending abruptly because their mothers have the same name was ridiculous.
• Bowdlerise: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze points out how parental complaints about the violence of the first movie resulted in the Turtles not being allowed to use their actual weapons, instead using random crap such as sausages, Nerf bats and yo-yos.
  • The Honest Trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe points out how no romantic relationships in the movies are ever shown to get physically intimate and no or minimal amounts of blood is spilled even during violent fight scenes.
  • The Honest Trailer for Hawkeye (2021) describes it as a more family-friendly take on Shane Black's typical action movies set during Christmas like Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, except without any actual lethal weapons or physical romances.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Book of Boba Fett remarks on how tame it is as a crime drama since Boba, despite being a supposed crime lord, won't do or frowns upon many typical crime lord actions, like murder, drug dealing, extortion and even stealing.
    Narrator: You know, I'm starting to think a crime drama on a children's network was a bad idea.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Pacific Rim is said to include: "Giant Robots", "Giant Monsters", and "Giant Robots Punching Giant Monsters".
  • The Starring part of the Honest Trailer for "Every Wes Anderson Movie" ends with a list of recurring elements that includes "Willem Dafoe, dead animals, Willem Dafoe playing a dead animal, Anjelica Huston, old-timey telephones, Anjelica Huston on an old-timey telephone, foreigners, classic rock songs, oil paintings, a foreigner playing a classic rock song in front of an oil painting, characters reading books, uniforms, graveyards, a character reading a book wearing a uniform in a graveyard, Jason Schwartzman, smoking, moving vehicles, Jason Schwartzman smoking outside a moving vehicle, a Wilson brother, strained sibling relationships, exotic animals, a Wilson brother and his estranged sibling smoking with an exotic animal, Ed Norton, reel-to-reel tape recorders, Ed Norton dictating into a reel-to-reel tape recorder while smoking and wearing a uniform, Bill Murray, tiny motorcycles, profile shots, and Bill Murray on a tiny motorcycle in a profile shot."
  • The starring part of the Honest Trailer for "Every Tim Burton Movie" has Lisa Marie, Helena Bonham Carter, Lisa Marie and Helena Bonham Carter.
  • The opening of the Honest Trailer for Batman: The Animated Series, as they compare its version of Batman to other versions:
    Narrator: Before he was swole, before he was existentially depressed, and before he was a cartoon, he was a swole, existentially depressed, literal cartoon[...].
  • The Honest Trailer for Jungle Cruise opens by pointing out recurring plot points in Dwayne Johnson's jungle movies:
    Narrator: You've seen The Rock make a jungle movie. You've seen The Rock make a movie where he teams up with a new friend to recover a shiny artifact. But have you seen The Rock make a jungle movie where he teams up with a new friend to recover a shiny artifact? Yes. Twice.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • Cinderella is, in their words, from the creators of Snow White, Fantasia and The Story of Menstruation.
  • In the Resident Evil trailer, the Umbrella Corporation is described as the one-stop shop for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and weaponized crimes against nature.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In the Divergent trailer, the Narrator stops during the intro and we see him in the recording booth, insisting that they've already done the trailer for this on The Hunger Games. It happens again at the end before "Starring..."
• Brick Joke:
  • In the Honest Trailer for 300, while listing the instances of Artistic License – History and things that actually were historically accurate, the narrator gets really perplexed by the goatman. While making a similar list in the later Honest Trailer for Gladiator, the narrator says it was more accurate than 300 and once again wonders out loud what the hell the goatman was.
  • In the Fantastic Four (2005) trailer, the narrator brings up The Incredibles as a perfect Fantastic Four movie. Then, in the Fantastic Four (2015) trailer, the narrator says it's been ten years since the last good Fantastic Four movie. Cue a clip of The Incredibles.
  • In The Stinger for Batman (1989), the narrator has trouble making out one of the Joker's lines, "I'm of a mind to make some mookie", and repeats some similar-sounding phrases. In the next Honest Trailer to be released, The Revenant, he reads the line properly during the comment requests.
• Bring My Brown Pants: His reaction to Brain!Andross in Star Fox 64:
  Narrator: Kinda makes a floating monkey head seem normal- OH MY GOD I PEED A LITTLE!
• Broken Aesop:
  • The Alice in Wonderland (2010) trailer points out how the "be your own independent woman" aesop rings a bit hollow when Alice declares her intent to Screw Destiny only to follow it anyway.
    Narrator: ... Girl Power?
  • The fact that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World chose the ending where Scott ends up with Ramona, who has had him fighting her exes, instead of the one where he ends up with Knives, who has loved him throughout the movie earns this:
    Narrator: What was the point of it all then? Be jealous and violent and chase after a toxic relationship while true love stares you in the face?!
  • The Honest Trailer for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has this to say about the fact that Rudolph is shunned by everyone around him and only allowed back because his glowing nose turns out to be helpful:
    ♫ The moral of this story, ♫
    ♫ Is that being different's bad, ♫
    ♫ Unless your defect's useful. ♫
    ♫ Man, this movie's really sad. ♫
  • The Honest Trailer for Beauty and the Beast (2017) points out how its intended message of True Beauty Is on the Inside kind of falls flat when everyone good in the movie turns out to be hot.
    Narrator: Because while inner beauty is what really matters, your ugly ass is definitely a curse.
  • The Honest Trailer for Wonder Woman notes that its message of female empowerment might come off as a bit flawed:
    Narrator: ...and had a powerful message for girls: save the world, look flawless doing it, be a literal god, then men might half-tolerate your presence. [half-hearted] Woohoo! Progress...
  • The Honest Trailer for Fifty Shades Freed points out how its attempt to be a story about empowering women and sexual freedom is completely undercut by the fact that Anastasia marries the first man she has sex with, gets her dream job because he bought the company and, after spending the better part of the movie not wanting to end up barefoot and pregnant, ends the trilogy literally barefoot and pregnant.
  • The Honest Trailer for the first three The Purge points out how its intended message of the dangers and importance of releasing one's violent impulses falls pretty flat because how much each movie stylizes gory killings.
  • The Honest Trailer for Pokémon: The First Movie points out how it's message about fighting being bad is rather hypocritical considering fights between Pokemon are the main point of the franchise.
  • The Honest Trailer for Mulan (2020) remarks that Mulan's struggle to make her way in a patriarchal empire loses a lot of its punch when she spends the movie fighting to protect that same empire and it ends with her joining the emperor's guard.
    Narrator: #GirlBoss!
  • The Honest Trailer for Raya and the Last Dragon points out how the movie's intended message of the need to trust people doesn't come across when its characters betray each other left and right.
    Narrator: You're saying "give people a chance", but you're showing that "chaos is a ladder".
  • The Honest Trailer for Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power points out how the series' depiction of good and evil can be a bit hard to take seriously when a MegaCorp like Amazon is producing it:
    Narrator: Now, return to Tolkien's grand, moral universe, where good lives in balance with nature, and evil destroys the land in a blind lust for power and profit. Brought to you by Amazon! I wonder if the Orc slaves get free two-day shipping.
• Broken Base: invoked The Honest Trailer for The Last Jedi breaks down how it divided the fanbase so widely and the bits both sides liked or disliked about the movie:
  Jon Bailey!Narrator: So gear up for the most divisive Star Wars film ever made...
  Gannon Nickell!Narrator: ...where Rian Johnson either doesn't understand the lore...
  Jon Bailey!Narrator: ...or he made the first Star Wars movie that actually lives up to the values it preaches, instead of endorsing royal bloodlines and reckless aggression.
• Brother–Sister Incest: The trailer for Return of the Jedi points out how Leia's confession that she's always known Luke is her brother makes the scenes in the previous movie where they make out even more awkward than they already were.
• Brutal Honesty: The style in which the trailers are narrated.
• Buffy Speak: The Honest Trailer for Avengers: Infinity War describes it as possibly the best movie Marvel has ever made, but "without a doubt, the most movie Marvel has ever made":
  Narrator: [over special effect-heavy action scenes] There is just... so much movie in this movie. Look at all that movie!
• Bullet Time: In the 300 trailer, they note the movie's overuse of dramatic falling stuff, Instagram filters, and............ suuuuuperr..... slooooooooooowwwwwwww...... moooooooooooooooootttttiiiiiiiiiooooooooonnnn.
• But Not Too Gay:
  • The Honest Trailer for Birds of Prey (2020) points out how Roman Sionis and Victor Zsasz's gay subtext is downplayed in the movie in an attempt to slip it past censors in China, showing a clip of Ewan McGregor giving a rambling answer to a question if the characters really are in a gay relationship.
  • The Honest Trailer for Cruella draws attention to Artie, "Disney's third or fourth first live-action gay character",^note After Joe Russo's unnamed character in Avengers: Endgame, the two unnamed women kissing in The Rise of Skywalker and LeFou in Beauty and the Beast (2017) and calls out Disney for not making the character so obviously gay that the movie wouldn't get past censors in China or Russia:
    Narrator: Disney does know that liking fashion isn't the same thing as being queer, right? [Beat] Right?
  • Similar to Cruella, the Honest Trailer for Jungle Cruise describes McGregor as "Disney's eighth first live-action gay character" and remarks on how easily his coming-out scene can be cut by censors.
  • The Honest Trailer for Jurassic World Dominion points out how it and the previous movie both had a character who has one line identifying her as a lesbian^note Zia in Fallen Kingdom, Kayla in Dominion that's easy enough to cut by censors.
• But Thou Must!: An aversion is lampshaded in the Mission: Impossible Film Series trailer.
  Narrator: An agency with a silly name... will deliver assignments in a ridiculous way to agents who can choose whether or not to accept them...
  [cue montage of Mission Briefing, all saying "should you choose to accept it"]
  Narrator: Um, what happens if they say no? Do we all just... die?
• Butt-Monkey: Aside from once calling him "great in small doses", the Marvel Cinematic Universe trailers seem to take extra effort in mocking Hawkeye. To the point that many comments of the trailer for his show complain about keeping the joke there.

C

• Call-Back:
  • In The Dark Knight Rises video, they announce that it stars the cast of Inception. In the Inception video, they announce that it stars the cast of The Dark Knight Rises. They also call back to their discontent with Rises by introducing Inception with "From the director of two good Batman movies comes a film that will obliterate your eardrums with deafening horn noises." BWOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNGGGG
  • In their trailer for Inception they showed the video getting flooded with requests for them to make a Honest Trailer of it. This happens again for the Harry Potter series, The Matrix, Dragonball Evolution, and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Fifty Shades of Grey has the flooding being followed by a special opening for the 100th episode.
  • The Pacific Rim speech ends up being a callback to the Independence Day one, complete with the best movie extra saluting. Hell yeah!
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire references Gale being a better match for Katniss again instead of Peeta.
  • The Lion King (1994) makes several references to the Frozen trailer, even doing another "Pork Song", in this case doing it by rewriting "Can You Feel the Love Tonight"? This would become a staple for Disney animated movies.
  • In the character roll call for Pokémon Red and Blue, they jokingly refer to Pikachu as "Japanese Mickey" and to Machamp as "Goro". Later, in the character roll call for Kingdom Hearts, they refer to Mickey Mouse as "American Pikachu", and in the character roll call for Mortal Kombat X, Goro is referred to as "Machamp".
  • Similarly, in the character roll call for Harry Potter, they refer to Dumbledore as "Gandalf the Gay". In their in the character roll call for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, they credit Gandalf as "Straight Dumbledore".
  • The The Divergent Series: Insurgent video repeats the narrator stopping his script reading when he thinks they've done the exact same material before, just like he did in the Divergent video when he pointed out the similarities to The Hunger Games. This time, he compares the twist ending to that of The Maze Runner.
  • During the The Force Awakens Honest Trailer, all of the Narrators want the Avatar Narrator to say "bluebs".
  • In the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Honest Trailer, after being completely disappointed, they capped it off with "But at least Suicide Squad looks good!" Their Honest Trailer for Suicide Squad ended up being even more negative and they ended it with "But at least Wonder Woman looks good... right?"
  • In the Honest Trailer for Jumanji, the movie is retitled The Jungle Book: The Game: The Movie. The later Honest Trailer for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, its reboot/sequel, the joke title is expanded upon into The Jungle Book: The Game: The Movie: The Reboot: The Video Game.
  • The "Every Quentin Tarantino Movie" Honest Trailer has a montage of foot shots scored to a parody of "Woo Hoo". The same parody is used in the Barbie Honest Trailer during that film's own montage of foot shots.
  • The Stinger of the Loki Season 2 Honest Trailer calls back to the stinger of the Thor: Ragnarok Honest Trailer as the narrator says not to commission a mural of the character's misdeeds and put it behind a mural of their accomplishments.
• California Doubling: invoked
  • Averted by Breaking Bad where you "journey to scenic New Mexico, because state tax laws make it cheaper to shoot there than Los Angeles."
  • In Cobra Kai, "return to the Atlanta area of the San Fernando Valley".
• The Cameo:
  • RedLetterMedia in The Dark Knight Rises Honest Trailer comes to pick apart every plot hole.
  • For Fast Five, the guy from CinemaSins shows up at the end to nitpick, and is promptly interrupted by the voice guy who starts pointing out bewbs. The favor's returned when the Honest Trailers voiceover turns up at the end of the Cinema Sins video for Superman Returns.
  • The guys at Team Four Star help out on their video on Dragonball Evolution, in-character from their roles in Dragon Ball Z Abridged.
  • Flula Borg, one of the actors in Pitch Perfect 2, appears at the end of their trailer for the first film.
  • The The Force Awakens Honest Trailer features all of the movie narrators who've appeared in the series, with a surprise appearance by Mr. Plinkett. They all start saying "Blewbs" in honor of the Avatar narrator.
  • In a special way, Ryan Reynolds reprises his role as the titular character from Deadpool, complete with Breaking the Fourth Wall and all!
  • Andre the Black Nerd and The Nostalgia Critic appear in the Honest Trailer for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live musical Out of Their Shells; the former to admit that he likes it, and the latter to show other crappier material the Turtles starred in, seemingly just to drive Epic Voice Guy into insanity.
  • During the "Starring" part for the Warcraft (2016) movie, the narrator can't remember who any of the characters are, so MatPat of Game Theory drops in to tell who everyone is.
  • In the Kong: Skull Island Honest Trailer, the movie's actual director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, makes an appearance and gives Epic Voice Guy a script with more nitpicks.
  • In the Cowboy Bebop Honest Trailer, Spike Spiegel's voice actor Steve Blum narrates The Stinger and the comments.
  • In the Starship Troopers Honest Trailer, Casper Van Dien repeats his role in the movie as Johnny Rico and reads the Starring section.
  • In the Hocus Pocus Honest Trailer, Jason Marsden reprises his role as the talking cat Thackery Binx to read the requested lines.
• Canon Discontinuity:
  • The Star Trek reboot is "the cool new franchise that used time travel gobbledygook to throw away 50 years of canon. But who cares, 'cause Star Trek is awesome again!"
  • The Honest Trailer for The Rise of Skywalker describes it as "the epic conclusion to The Force Awakens" and calls it Episode 7.5, referring to how the movie ignored or wrote out almost all of the plot developments from the actual previous film in the trilogy, The Last Jedi.
  • The Honest Trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings describes it as the MCU's first time bringing a martial arts master to the screen, deliberately ignoring Iron Fist (2017).
• Cant Unhear It: invoked In the Honest Trailer for Space Jam, the narrator is bothered by the fact that the voices of the Looney Tunes are done by "creepy soundalikes" since their most famous voice actor, Mel Blanc, is dead.
• Captain Ersatz: The Honest Trailer for Wreck-It Ralph suggests that Ralph, Fix-It Felix and Calhoun as stand-ins for Donkey Kong, Mario and Master Chief, respectively, created because Disney couldn't afford the rights for them.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Predator points out how the Predator's nature would have made for one hell of a mystery - if the movie hadn't given it away by showing a shot of a spaceship at the start of the movie:
    Billy: There's something in those trees.
    Narrator: It's an alien.
    Mac: Those eyes, then... They're disappearing.
    Narrator: Yup, alien. Saw the ship.
    Billy: There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man.
    Narrator: Okay, fine; I'll do what YouTube comments do: "Movie starts at 1:29".
  • The Honest Trailer for Red Notice points out how Hartley secretly being a criminal is foreshadowed so much that the reveal probably won't surprise many:
    Narrator: Study Agent Hartley's every move, because there may be more to this art cop than meets the eye.
    [scenes with hints...]
    Narrator: Just a few more hints; the data says one subscriber in Guam doesn't see it coming yet.
    [more scenes...]
    Narrator: Okay, he's got it. Deploy the twist!
    [the reveal scene is shown]
    Narrator: Gasp!
  • In the Honest Trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the narrator gets frustrated by how the movie tries to delay the reveal of Kang's name, with characters just referring to him as "him", when the audience must have known his identity by that point:
    Narrator: Yeah, we met him in Loki; you don't have to be coy about the name.
    [...]
    Narrator: It's not a big reveal! He told us who he was! He's in the Cold Open!
• Caption Humor: While most times they just transcribe the narration, at times the captions do extra jokes. Best example is Jupiter Ascending: As the narrator sums up the indescribably ridiculous plot, the captions do a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer while taking extra shots ("If you think the trailer is dragging on, try watching the actual movie").
• Car Fu: The trailer for Transformers: Age of Extinction includes a shot of a soldier getting punched by the wheel of a car in motion.
• Career Resurrection: invoked The Honest Trailer for Split describes the movie as having had this effect on M. Night Shyamalan:
  Narrator: From the director who exploded onto the scene, went out like a hot fart, comes what might be M. Night Shyamalan's biggest. Surprise. Yet: he's actually kind of good again. I did not see this happening.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: For The Princess Bride the narrator points out that no danger in the movie is too great to keep the characters from having a polite conversation.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • When noting that Cap's list in Captain America: The Winter Soldier claims he watched Star Wars, the Narrator muses that seeing the physical similarity between Nick Fury and Mace Windu probably blew his mind. The Screen Junkies crew actually did ask^note Start at 5:08 The Russo Brothers, "In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is it just a coincidence that Mace Windu looks like Nick Fury, or is it like in Last Action Hero where Sylvester Stallone plays all the Arnold Schwarzenegger parts?",^note Stallone appears on a Terminator 2: Judgment Day poster in Last Action Hero. to which Anthony Russo responded, "You're hurting my brain."
  • The Honest Trailer for X-COM has the narrator marveling at what a sweet voice the UN Commander has (both roles are by the same voice actor.)
• Celebrity Resemblance: The Pacific Rim trailer refers to Guillermo del Toro as "Latino Peter Jackson".
• Chandler's Law:
  • The Starring part of the Honest Trailer for Aquaman includes "Explosive Interuptions", showing dialogue scenes in the movie that are cut off when something explodes nearby.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Rise of Skywalker points out how often the movie interupts moments of character growth with sudden action scenes:
    Narrator: You know, I've been thinking a lot about this film, and the biggest issue it has at its core is- Oh no, TIE fighters! Everybody scram!
• Character Derailment: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Justice League points out how it reduced Wonder Woman from a well-rounded character to "girl hung up on her ex", referring to how much her past with Steve Trevor in her own movie is brought up throughout the movie.
  • The Honest Trailer for Solo points out how little the title character's personality makes sense given what he was like when he was introduced in the original trilogy:
    Narrator: [Alden Ehrenreich]'ll add new dimensions to the selfish, outlaw pilot we met in New Hope by showing use he was never much of an outlaw...
    Q'ira: You are the good guy...
    Narrator: ...and he was never really that selfish...
    [clip of Han risking his own life to save Lando from blaster fire]
    Narrator: ...but boy did he have a hard-on for being a pilot!
    [montage of scenes where Han talks about wanting to be a pilot]
  • The Honest Trailer for Men in Black: International remarks how the characterization of the two leads, H (Chris Hemsworth) and M (Tessa Thompson), varies widely throughout the movie; H is both presented as the MiB's top agent and a total screw-up, and M is either by-the-book or completely reckless.
• Characterization Marches On: The Narrator started out as initially denying wanting guys too, as shown in The Hunger Games trailer, but since Man of Steel and beyond has openly ogled both guys and gals.
• Character Tics: The Starring part of the Honest Trailer for Star Trek: The Next Generation points out "the Picard maneuver" and "the Riker maneuver", the former being Picard's habit of adjusting his shirt whenever he sits down, and the latter being Riker's habit of sitting down on chairs by moving one leg over the backrest rather than just sit down on the seat from the front.
• Chew Bubblegum:
  • Or "chem bubblegum", as the case may be.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Predator about the villain, Traeger (Sterling K. Brown):
    Narrator: He's here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and he's all out of-
    [several attempts by the narrator to finish the sentence as Traeger just stands around chewing gum]
    Narrator: Okay, I guess he's just here to chew gum, and die.
• Chickification: The Honest Trailer for Revenge of the Sith complains that the movie reduced Amidala to being "barefoot and pregnant" throughout most of the movie after she in previous movies had been a badass queen, senator and warrior.
• China Takes Over the World: The final third of the Transformers: Age of Extinction trailer is in Chinese, because the last third of the movie is set in China in order to "pander to Chinese audience [and] boost international appeal." The renamed title of the movie is "Transformers: Welcome to China."
• Chirping Crickets:
  • This sound effect is used in the Star Trek trailer to underscore how boring the idea of Nero drifting around in space for 25 years instead of just warning his planet of their impending demise is.
  • Also when Aang is Waterbending... or rather, "doing his greenbelt Karate demonstration."
  • The Stinger in the Honest Trailer for Jurassic World uses it after showing a skit within the movie of Jimmy Fallon.
  • You can hear chirping crickets in the Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer when Egon's ghost stays around much longer than the narrator expects or wants.
• Chroma Key:
  • The Honest Trailer for The Jungle Book (2016) shows how pretty much everything you see in the movie is CGI, and was shot in a studio with lots of blue screens. The Blue Screens used for this are even named in the credits.
  • The Honest Trailer for the Indiana Jones trilogy praises the movies for their compelling action scenes that had real characters, real stakes and clarity of movement - and notes that later filmmakers apparently got too lazy to put that much effort into action scenes and instead just bloated the screen with CGI action; this includes the Indiana Jones films' creators, George Lucas (exemplified with Attack of the Clones) and Steven Spielberg (exemplified with Ready Player One).
  • The Honest Trailer for Hocus Pocus laments about how much of the sequel is filmed in front of a green screen when the first movie was shot on actual physical locations.
• Chronically Killed Actor:
  • Discussed with Sean Bean's fate in virtually every role he plays.
    • The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy "where every main character faces constant mortal danger... but only Sean Bean dies. Gee, haven't seen that before." Cue montage of every scene of every movie that Bean dies in.
    • Referenced indirectly again in their Game of Thrones trailer.
    Narrator: Ride along on adventure where any lead character can die. Whether you're Sean Bean, Sean Bean's wife, Sean Bean's best friend, Sean Bean's son, Sean Bean's daughter-in-law, Sean Bean's family dogs, or Sean Bean's unborn grandkid. All men must die... who are in any way close to Sean Bean.
    • And then he actually survives in Jupiter Ascending.
    Narrator: Wait, Sean Bean dies in every good movie, but survives in this one? Wow, they couldn't even kill Sean Bean right.
    • In the Final Fantasy XV trailer, King Regis is referred to as "Another Sean Bites the Dust".
  • The Honest Trailer for Reefer Madness and The Big Lebowski points out how characters played by Steve Buscemi tend to get killed in movies by The Coen Brothers.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The Honest Trailer for Mission: Impossible – Fallout points out how countless supporting characters from the previous films, such as those played by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Laurence Fishburne, just disappeared from the franchise without being mentioned again.
  Narrator: Where do these people go? Are they the Apostles?
• Cliché Storm: invoked
  • World War Z's "Starring" list-off instead lists cliches the movie utilizes, including dead car batteries, flickering lights, shaky cam, jump scares, zombies banging on doors, a kid with asthma, accidental noises, and obligatory Inception BWAAS.
  • Even though Love Actually is considered a "subversive" romantic comedy, its Honest Trailer points out how many rom-com cliches it plays completely straight, such as "the last-minute airport dash, awkward meet cutes, making out behind the curtain and getting discovered, singing in public, adorable children, over-the-top gestures, and Hugh fucking Grant".
  • The Walking Dead has a starring list comprised of filthy clothing, infinite ammo, basic cable nudity, improbable headshots, group debate, Dale Face, ugly cry-face, Rick's hat, gun safety, bite checks, zombie extras drinking water, stuff, things, silent hand gestures, and Shane rubbing his head.
  • Green Lantern (2011) has a lot of clichés from superhero movies, including: a science experiment gone wrong, the themes of power and responsibility, a rushed training montage, a kidnapped love-interest, and a traumatic early death of a father figure.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction: "Prepare for a total reinvention of the franchise with an all-new cast, all-new villains, and cool new allies... only to end up with the overly long piece of sh-[bleep] where we once again have... No... Idea... What's... Happening. Hey, if Michael Bay can reuse shots, we can reuse Transformers jokes!"
  • The Honest Trailer for The Expendables lists several "bad action movie cliches from the past 40 years", such as the way heroes avoid every bullet fired at them from The '80s, the cheesy one-liners from The '90s, the bad blood animation of the 2000s and the crappy CGI animation in general from today.
  • The Maze Runner's "Starring" segment goes through a list of YA literature clichés that the movie uses, namely ones shared by similar recent YA novel adaptations like The Hunger Games and Divergent. However, at the end of the list, the Epic Voice Guy is surprised to find out that they didn't use the most common YA cliché of all: the Love Triangle. He calls it a "huge oversight."
  • The Honest Trailer for The Emoji Movie describes the plot as: [Gene] needs to believe in himself, get the girl, save the world, and probably some other generic protagonist goals you’ll miss while you nap through the second act.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Kissing Booth and The Kissing Booth 2 lists several teen fiction clichés the movie uses besides the titular kissing booth, such as a "popular girl" clique, a character getting drunk and dancing on a table, a prom night finale and an airport chase.
  • The Honest Trailer for Elvis (2022) lists a bunch of musician biopic movie clichés the movie uses:
    Narrator: ...if you're a historian of music movie clichés, get ready to walk hard through all the hits, like "nervous first performance with mic feedback", a "rising up the charts" montage, the "Hey, kid, try some drugs!" moment, even the "supportive wife who stood by the artist since the beginning"[...]
• Close on Title: Each trailer ends with a mock title for the movie (though The Stinger typically follows after this).
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: Since The Wolf of Wall Street has an average of 3.6 f-words per minute, its trailer has to bleep them out of nearly every clip. Then the Narrator joins in as well and punctuates every sentence with "f*cking".
• Cluster F-Bomb: The Screen Junkies supercut video for "Just the F-Words" in The Wolf of Wall Street...is a double-subversion. The supercut shows off perfectly innocuous words that happen to start with the letter 'F', before concluding with one actual F-bomb.
• Coincidental Broadcast: The starring part of the trailer for The Boys (2019) draws attentions to how often characters learn about important facts because they just happen to see a news broadcast about it.
• Colon Cancer:
  • Their alternative title for LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: "The Avengers: The Movie: The Toys: The Game"
  • Their alternative title for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle: "The Jungle Book: The Game: The Movie: The Reboot: The Video Game"
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • The Stinger for the Terminator Genisys does a comparison to Back to the Future, saying "So he's sending his dad back in time to have sex with his mom? Why is incest always the go-to plot in time travel movies?" Except, of course, like most parents of the world, Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor are not related, making it not incestuous at all.
  • The trailer for Cruella completely ignores 101 Dalmatians (1996) and seems to think the 1961 cartoon is all the character had for her (highlighted by the quote "everyone nostalgic for 101 Dalmatians will be dead in ten years.").
  • The Honest Trailer for Barbie draws attention how the lesson Hollywood took from its great success seems to be not that female-centric comedies can be hits too when they're good, but instead that movies based on toys are successful, which is why they've started working on movies based on the likes of Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels.
• Comical Overreacting:
  • The narrator will at times get really angry, such as in a diatribe over meter maids given it's what Zootopia protagonist Judy Hopps starts as.
  • In the Kong: Skull Island Honest Trailer, the film's director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, goes off on a rant about complaints that the movie has too many helicopters in it.
    Narrator: [reading from Vogt-Roberts' own script] But it is not, I repeat, not a problem that there are too. Many. Helicopters. [off script] Wait, what?
    Vogt-Roberts: Look, everybody thinks that there's some issue where there's more helicopters in the sky than there are on the boat and then Kong takes down an infinite amount of them. Guess what? You're wrong. In the shot in the movie, when the camera goes arond the boat, you see the back of the boat. And guess what's in the back of the boat? [knocks down a King Kong figurine] Fucking helicopters! What's inside of the boat? More helicopters! What's the boat fucking made out of? Fucking helicopters! You know why? [picks up a King Kong Funko Pop! figurine] Cause you want to see Kong, like the toy has, grabbing a fucking helicopter! You want to pay $15 not to see him fucking use the helicopter like a fucking baseball bat?! The helicopter math made fucking sense!
  • In the beginning of the Honest Trailer for The Mandalorian, while recounting the various ups and downs of the Star Wars franchise, the narrator almost starts angrily ranting about the ending of The Rise of Skywalker.
    Narrator: Sorry, sorry. Not today, Episode 9.
• Compensating for Something: From the John Wick: Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 trailer:
  Narrator: So enjoy this franchise that loves guns so much, you'll swear they're compenising for something.
• Complexity Addiction: From Thor:
  Narrator: Meet Loki, Thor's brother, who will not stop until he betrays his adoptive father with the help of his real father, in order to kill his real father... to impress his adoptive father? Gee, that makes even less sense than his plan in The Avengers.
  Tony Stark: Not a great plan.
• Compressed Adaptation: Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) is described as "a panicked desperate sprint through the major events of Book 1."
• Confusing Multiple Negatives: The trailer for The Rise of Skywalker says that the director has "never seen a landing he couldn't not stick."
• Content Warning: For select Honest Trailers for new movies/shows released after March 2012, they'll each be "rated 's' for spoilers" if they believe that the content included in them was intentionally left out of their marketing campaigns for said spoiler-related purposes or it will ruin the suspense for viewers that care about going in blind to these things. This is almost regardless of how these warnings will age as time goes by and to a lesser extent, the work's artistic quality and whether or not they would be necessary to begin with.
• Contested Sequel: invoked Chrono Cross is described as a highly divisive sequel to Chrono Trigger for throwing out everything that people liked about the first game in favor of new ideas. The trailer says that it inspires debates that have lasted for decades, and probably would have been more popular without the word "Chrono" in the title.
• Continuity Lockout: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for The Fate of the Furious points out how much the movie builds on the last three movies, which can get troublesome for viewers who don't really watch the movies for the story:
    Frank Petty/"Mr. Nobody": Oh yeah, brother Owen! Who could forget him, huh?
    Narrator: I did.
    Dominic Toretto: ...Elena?
    Narrator: Uh... who's that, though?
    Ramsey: He's also linked to someone I'd like to forget. [a picture of Mose Jakande from Furious 7 is shown]
    Narrator: Wait, Djimon Hounsou was in these? Look, I came here for cars and butts in no particular order. Don't overthink this, guys.
  • The Honest Trailer for Avengers: Infinity War likewise points out how the MCU is suffering from this by now:
    Narrator: Marvel's gotten so big, they drop you right into episode 19 part 1 of 2, without wasting a second on who anyone is or why you should care.
  • The MCU case is brought up again in the trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp, which points out how the movie will make little sense to those that have not seen Captain America: Civil War, even showing an interview with Michael Douglas, one of the actors of the film, about how he had not seen that movie when he was first handed the script for Ant-Man and the Wasp.
  • The Honest Trailer for Pokémon: The First Movie points out how the movie assumes everybody who watches it is already familiar enough with Pokemon to know who the main characters are, why Meowth can talk etc., since it doesn't botter to explain any of these things.
  • The Honest Trailer for Demon Slayer: Mugen Train points out how the movie immediately picks up where Season 1 of the TV series ended, but doesn't explain anything about who the characters are.
  • The Honest Trailer for No Time to Die remarks on how hard it is to keep track of the overarching story in the most recent Bond movies when there are years between new entries in the franchise:
    Bond: What is it with your dad and secret rooms?
    Narrator: You think I remember? Her dad (Mr. White) was introduced during the Bush administration.
• Continuity Porn: The Force Awakens has, alongside Jon Bailey, Gannon Nickell, the original recurring narrator of Honest Trailers, Ptolemy Slocum, the narrator of the very first Honest Trailer, for The Phantom Menace ("in 3D!"), and Dough Medlock, the one-shot narrator for Avatar ("Bluebs!").
• Continuity Snarl: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight points out how the movies seem to have given up any pretense of having some semblance of a consistent backstory:
    Narrator: Forget everything you knew about the Transformers, because so did Michael Bay, who in the third one said Cybertron was destroyed, and in this one said "actually, it's back", in the fourth one said Megatron is now Galvatron, and in this one said "uh, never mind, he's Megatron again", and in the first one said the Transformers came to Earth to find the AllSpark and learned English from the Internet, and in this one said "you know what, fuck it; they were allies with King Arthur and one of them killed Hitler!"
  • The Honest Trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong lists issues with the continuity from the previous movies, like Dr. Serizawa having a son that hadn't been mentioned before, characters like Alan Jonah and Sam Coleman being completely forgotten and characters forgetting that the center of the Earth has hollows in it, a major plot point Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019).
• Contrived Coincidence: In World War Z, "Watch Brad Pitt survive an un-survivable apocalypse thanks to a constant stream of lifesaving coincidences like: never hitting traffic in the middle of mass hysteria; finding an RV with the keys and a loaded gun inside; this friendly mugger showing him where to find medicine; this friendly Mexican family taking him in, no questions asked; these fast zombies who slow down as soon as they are about to catch him; this small child headshotting a zombie on top of him; this plane dropping a ladder down to save him mid-takeoff; this Israeli soldier killing a zombie about to eat him; surviving this car crash; surviving this plane crash; surviving a spike through his stomach; and shooting up with a randomly picked virus that happens to be curable while also serving as zombie camouflage."
• Cool, but Stupid: The Narrator's opinion of Pacific Rim. He dubs it "either The Most Awesome Dumb Movie Ever Made or The Dumbest Awesome Movie Ever Made."
  Narrator: Let's be honest, that movie was super dumb. But I still cannot wait for the sequel!
• Cosmetically-Advanced Prequel: In the Honest Trailer for Alien: Covenant, it's pointed out that the graphics of the ship's computers are way more futuristic than those of the the first film, despite Covenant being a prequel.
• Crack is Cheaper: invoked
  • The video for Clash of Clans bashes the game for being so addictive and charging so much money for allowing players to skip construction times of buildings in the game, which can take several days.
  • Similarly, the narrator lets Candy Crush Saga have it for earning so much money from the game when people pay for power-ups, skipping levels, extra lives and being able to buy more extra lives. The video even describes it as being "as addictive as crack, but far less rewarding."
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • The Honest Trailer for Iron Man points out how Tony Stark constantly invents stuffs that the villains would eventually take and use against him, and humanity in general.
    Narrator: Seriously, Tony? Just do the world a favor and stop working.
  • The Honest Trailer for Suicide Squad notes how Amanda Waller is ultimately responsible for allowing the Enchantress to rise to power:
    Narrator: With Superman level threats on the rise, Amanda Waller has a solution: she's bringing together a bunch of bad guys to save the world... from the bad guy she brought together to save the world.
• Creator Backlash: Invoked in Godzilla (1998), which discusses Toho's reaction to the film by featuring the Take That! scenes from Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! and Godzilla: Final Wars.
• Creator's Oddball: invoked in the honest trailer for Luca, which points out how the movie does not delve into philosophical or existential topics that are ususally the norm for Pixar (which the Narrator is thankful for, since he can't handle another Coco), but instead tells a story about two fishboys having a great summer together.
• Creator Thumbprint: invoked
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen lists all of the movie's Michael Bay-isms, including spinning camera, the military, low angle shots of people getting out of cars, glistening face sweat, hot babe extras, slow motion shots of helicopters, and BEWMS ("booms"). This is followed by a montage of every fireball explosion in the movie accompanied by "The Stars and Stripes Forever", then adds Brick Tamland shouting "LOUD NOISES!!".
  • The Honest Trailer for the first four films in the Mission: Impossible Film Series notes how the director of each movie applied their own styles or trademark techniques to them:
    Narrator: Sit back as a revolving door of directors bring their signature style to each installment, as long as Tom Cruise approves. Featuring: the psychodrama of Brian De Palma, the shaky cam of J. J. Abrams, the cartoon sensibilities of Brad Bird, and the diving sideways with two guns at the same time in the middle of a flock of birds and slow motion by John Woo. Come on, man; never go full Woo.
  • The Honest Trailer for Jupiter Ascending describes it as containing The Wachowskis' "signature blend of CGI bullshit, lazy philosophy" and borrowing plot elements from The Matrix.
  • The Honest Trailer for Split notes that, while the movie is one of director M. Night Shyamalan's best films in recent years, it does have some of his worse trademarks, such as "vacant staring, wooden acting and the worst dialogue this side of The Happening".
  • Even though the movie was directed by Patty Jenkins, the Starring part of Wonder Woman refers to the movie's slow motion shots as "Snyder-Vision", referring to Zack Snyder's (who served as producer and co-story writer on the movie) habit of doing a lot of similar shots in his movies.
  • The Honest Trailer for Face/Off points out how it has many of John Woo's signature moves, such as scenes where a character dives from a great height, dual-wielding pistols and shots featuring doves. "So. Many. Doves."
  • The Honest Trailer for mother! (2017) points out the movie's thematic similarities to other works by its director, Darren Aronofsky:
    Narrator: From the mind behind Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan and Noah comes a gruesome, paranoid Bible allegory... which is kind of what you should expect by now, from the mind behind Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan and Noah.
• Creator Worship: invoked The Honest Trailer for "Every Christopher Nolan Movie" points out how, even though the Honest Trailer describes him as one of the best filmmakers of this generation, his most hardcore fans will probably pay no attention to that and only take note of the jokey nitpicks.
• Critical Dissonance: invoked
  • "Experience the games reviewers said were hard, but never unfair, then realize that's total bullsh*t as you fall victim to: bad camera control, laaaag, and the game's own horrible collision detection. Because when it comes to Dark Souls, bugs are just features that make it more extreme."
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, "the battle of the century... between critics and fans."
• Crossover:
  • Star Trek Into Darkness features a How It Should Have Ended skit, where Spock Prime tells his past self everything he needs to know to deal quickly and efficiently with a whole lot of the problems-of-the-week from the TV series and the next several movies. How It Should Have Ended returns the favor by featuring the Narrator in their episode of "How Star Trek Into Darkness Should Have Ended".
  • How It Should Have Ended also lent a hand in the The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies video, where they imagine how the book about the adventure Bilbo is seen writing would actually turn out, with plenty of references to invokedthe many changes the films made to the story and the scenes they added to tie the story into the The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
  • In the same vein, Honest Trailers did a The Amazing Spider-Man 2 CinemaSins-style video. Cinema Sins, in return, did an Honest Trailer of the same movie.
  • In the Honest Trailer of Dragonball Evolution, the narrator gets help from the manga/show's characters, voiced by the people of Team Four Star, to understand the Dragon Ball lore.
  • The Honest Trailer of Money Plane features a guest appearance of Screen Rant Pitch Meetings, giving the movie the Pitch Meeting treatment and picking apart its logic.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • In The Stinger of "Frozen Fever", when the narrator notices something about the snowgies:
    Narrator: Do you remember when Disney actually tried to hide the innuendoes in their films? 'Cause those things look like chubby little d— BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE HONEST TRAILERS
  • After the end of the Honest Trailer for Die Hard, Epic Voice Guy reads user-submitted variations of the most famous line from the movie, like "Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmer" and "Yippie-ki-yay, mother funker". At the very end, he starts reading the actual catchphrase, but the video ends before he can finish it with "Yippie-ki-yay, motherf-".
• Cursed with Awesome: The trailer for The Mummy (1999) has the Narrator wondering what exactly the pharaoh was thinking when he cursed Imhotep, considering the vast amount of superpowers the curse gave him.

D

• Daddy Issues: The Honest Trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe points out how many of it's heroes have problems with their fathers (for various reasons), to the point that Dads can be considered the true villains of the MCU. This is continued upon in the trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which again points out Bad Dads are the greatest threat in the MCU.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • The Honest Trailer for Jurassic World described it as "the best Jurassic Park sequel ever made... which really isn't saying much", showing the infamous talking Velociraptor dream sequence from Jurassic Park III.
  • The trailer for Revenge of the Sith describes it as "The best Star Wars prequel...by default."
  • The Honest Game Trailer for League of Legends describes it as "one of the best games of all time... that your parents didn't have to buy for you".
  • invokedUntil Dawn is described as "the best interactive horror experience since Night Trap", showing some pretty goofy-looking footage from Night Trap where a woman is attacked by a group of masked thugs and has her blood drained by a big, tube-fitted device. However, the video later describes the game as "the best horror game since P.T.", which was considered genuinely scary and whose cancellation angered many.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is described as "the best videogame-themed movie since The Wizard", showing the much-derided "I love the Power Glove, it's so bad" scene.
  • Godzilla (2014) is described as "the best American Godzilla movie", which isn't really saying much considering it's only competitor for that title is the awful Godzilla (1998).
  • Hook is described as the best movie in the "Peter Pan-theon" - in that it's less racist than the Disney version, more memorable than the 2003 movie and contains the fewest covers of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
  • Mary Poppins is described as Disney's best live-action movie of the 1960s - placing it in such stellar company as The Gnome-Mobile, The Horse In The Grey Flannel Suit, Monkeys, Go Home! and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.
    Narrator: Man, how did Disney stick around long enough to run the world? They spent, like, three decades making Troy McClure movies.
  • Space Jam is "the Citizen Kane of live-action-animated-hybrid basketball movies."
  • Alita: Battle Angel is described as Hollywood's best live-action adaptation of a manga yet - but also points out that's not a high bar to clear.
  • In the Honest Trailer for The Lion King (2019), the narrator lists invokedimprovements the earlier Disney Live-Action Remakes made:
    Narrator: Cinderella (2015) transformed a passive heroine into an active hero. Jungle Book (2016) crafted a narrative out of scattered source material. The other ones (Aladdin (2019), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Dumbo (2019))... were movies.
  • The Honest Trailer for The New Mutants describes it as the fourth-best superhero movie of... 1995, placing it behind Batman Forever, Tank Girl and Judge Dredd, knocking down Darkman II: The Return of Durant from the number 4 spot.
  • When noting that The Shawshank Redemption, described by them as a masterpiece, is currently #1 on IMDb's Top 250 Movies of all Time list, the Honest Trailer remarks that it probably helps that the collective users on the site haven't seen that many different movies combined.
  • The trailer for Tenet mentions that Christopher Nolan has been criticized for overbaked plots, underdeveloped characters and all-white heroes. It cuts to the Protagonist, who is black, and says, "Well, he's addressed one of those things."
  • The Honest Trailer for Season 2 of The Mandalorian says it's either "the greatest thing we've ever seen", or it's just so well-liked because of how the quality of Star Wars' other live-action content has gone down so much that basic competence looks amazing.
  • The Honest Trailer for Zack Snyder's Justice League says that while the Joss Whedon cut was "two hours long and terrible," the Snyder cut is "four hours long, and... mediocre."
    Narrator: "If you want to look great by comparison, just stand next to Joss Whedon."
  • The Honest Trailer for The Book of Boba Fett describes the title character as the best part of the infamous Holiday Special, "which really isn't saying much".
  • Boba Fett gets it again in the Honest Trailer for Andor.
    Narrator: You loved The Mandalorian. You liked most of Kenobi. And Boba Fett...exists.
  • In the Honest Trailer for the three 2022 Pinocchio movies; Pinocchio: A True Story, Pinocchio (2022, Disney) and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, the narrator says A True Story stars "the best voice talent currently on Cameo", alluding to how the careers of lead voice actors Pauly Shore and Jon Heder has taken a bit of a downturn... before clearing his throat and showing that he's (Jon Bailey) on Cameo too.
  • In the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the narrator calls the movie a masterpiece....compared to the rest of post-Endgame entries of the MCU.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) is described as better than The Last Airbender, but only because the latter "set the bar under the f*cking ground."
• Damsel Scrappy: invoked The Narrator's opinion of Mary Jane of the Spider-Man Trilogy.
  Narrator: Meet Mary Jane, the love of Peter's life and the worst girlfriend ever. Grow to hate her snaggle-toothed face as she cheats on her boyfriend with Spider-Man, cheats on her fiance with Peter Parker, and cheats on Peter Parker with his best friend. You'll wonder why anyone bothers to save her over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
• Dancing Bear: invoked
  • In the Honest Trailer for Boyhood, a movie about a kid growing up, the fact that it was filmed in about a decade to star a cast aging with their characters is considered this.
    "It's a beautiful movie, but honestly... if you took the same script and shot it over a few months, it would suck."
  • In the Honest Trailer for Memento, it suggests that the story's reverse chronological order belies a fairly ordinary thriller.
  • The Phantom Menace ruined everything you used to love about Star Wars, but they did it IN THREE-D!!!!
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The narrator goes out of his way to point out how this does not work in Man of Steel...
    Narrator: So if you loved the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, but wished they made them less hopeful, killed countless civilians, visualized our worst fears of urban terrorism and had Superman overcome his first villain by murdering him with his bare hands, DC has made the reboot for you, psycho!
  • ...and Alice in Wonderland (2010).
    Narrator: Enter the joyless, bombed-out post-apocalyptic wasteland known as Underland. Seriously, Wonderland is Underland now. Watch your childhood wither and die as its replaced by a sepia-toned hellhole full of: animal cruelty, creatures licking open wounds and creatures getting stabbed in the eye. Ugh.
  • The Honest Trailer for Batman: The Killing Joke mocks it for going out of its way to include R-Rated elements, like bloody violence, drugs, prostitution and excessive profanity.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Empire Strikes Back points out that due to how dark it was in comparison to its preceding film, the name became shorthand for this.
    Narrator: In a sequel so dark, it became the lazy shorthand for every time a franchise turns even so slightly to the dark side.
  • The Honest Trailer for Every Tim Burton Movie points out how the director has a habit of darkening the title card of every studio he ever worked for.
  • The Honest Trailer for Snow White & the Huntsman and The Huntsman: Winter's War suggests that the movie was part of Universal's then ongoing attempt to build a franchise by taking public domain fairytales and making dark and gritty movies out of them.
  • The Honest Trailer for The Batman (2022) shows the Batman film adaptations getting progressively darker.
    Narrator: Darker than that... even darker... DARKER... that's... just a black screen... there we go. Nice.
• Dawson Casting: invoked
  • The Narrator points out that The Maze Runner has "a society of grown men actors playing teenaged boys."
  • In the Honest Trailer for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie notes that, despite it being about a group of "teenagers with attitude", none of the actors playing Power Rangers were actually in their teens when it was made.
  • The Honest Trailer for Batman Forever notes that Robin, a.k.a. "The Adult Wonder", was played by Chris O'Donnell, who was in his 20s at the time.
  • In the Honest Trailer for Starship Troopers, the narrator can't even keep a straight face when referring to the characters as "teenagers".
  • The Honest Trailer for The Kissing Booth and The Kissing Booth 2 credits includes "Teenagers", showing a cast member who is clearly older than that.
• Deal with the Devil: From the Cats Honest Trailer:
  Narrator: Now that director Tom Hooper has won his Oscar, Satan has returned to claim his half of the deal.
• Decoy Protagonist:
  • The narrator considers Max this in the Mad Max: Fury Road video since Furiosa's struggle to save the brides of the Citadel is the central conflict, with Max taking a more supporting role in the story. During the Starring part, Tom Hardy is even called "Tom Hardly-In-The-Movie".
    Narrator: Oh, and there's a guy named Max in it too. He just kind of hangs out.
  • The opening for the Honest Trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home suggests that Spider-Man has been subordinate to other characters in the character's past MCU movies, and that he's doing it again this time too with the two other live-action Spider-Men:
    Narrator: He's played second fiddle to Iron Man, second fiddle to Iron Man's supporting cast, and second fiddle to Iron Man's astrologer. But this time, Tom Holland swings into uncharted territory playing third fiddle... to Spider-Man.
• Dead Star Walking: In the Godzilla (2014) trailer:
  Narrator: Prepare for a movie that was sold as a face off between Walter White and Godzilla... Yet barely contains any Bryan Cranston ... And even less Godzilla. Seriously, there's less than 20 minutes of him: we counted. (Caption: Only 11 minutes, 16 seconds of Godzilla out of a 122 minute movie).
• Death Is Cheap:
  • The Honest Trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 points out how the death of Yondu is probably the most genuinely tragic death in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far - because just about every other hero or good character who has died in the movies up until that point has either come back to life, wasn't developed enough to make their death emotional, or in the case of Peggy Carter, simply died of old age and thus was somewhat expected:
    Narrator: ...[a]ll to create maximum emotional impact when he's killed off in the most tragic Marvel death since... [shows the death of The Ancient One in Doctor Strange] Errmm... no? [shows the funeral of Peggy Carter in Captain America: Civil War] Eh, she was in her 90s, so... [shows the apparent death of Bucky Barnes in Captain America: The First Avenger] He came back. [shows clip of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) before he sacrifices himself] He came back. [shows the apparent death of Nick Fury in Captain America: The Winter Soldier] He came back. [shows the apparent deaths of Loki in both Thor and Thor: The Dark World] He came back. Twice. [shows the death of Phil Coulson in The Avengers] He came back on TV. [shows the death of Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron] Quicksilver? Ehh... I guess it's Yondu by default.
  • The Honest Trailer for Avengers: Infinity War points out how, in true comic book tradition, the many deaths of various heroes, including the lead characters in profitable movies, probably won't last long, comparing to when it happened in The Death of Superman, The Death of Captain America and, notably, The Infinity Gauntlet, from which much of story is based off, where the same thing happened and was undone.
  • The Honest Trailer for Season 2 of The Mandalorian remarks that, with fan favorite characters from the cancelled Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels joining the series, Boba Fett's death in Return of the Jedi being undone and young Luke Skywalker's appearance in the Season 2 finale, it seems that Star Wars characters have become unable to ever truly stop making appearances, even when their stories are done:
    Narrator: It's official: no one in Star Wars gets to die or retire anymore. This season's most meaningful death was when they killed off a merchandising opportunity.
    [footage of Mando's ship being destroyed]
    Narrator: NOOOOOOOOOOO, my collectible!
• Death Glare: The narrator cowers at one from Katniss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, after saying that all books must now be stretched into as many films as possible.
  Narrator: Okay, we'll see the sequels! Please don't hurt us!
• Death Montage: Sean Bean gets one during the Lord of the Rings trailer, where, after pointing out how his character is the only protagonist who died despite the dangerous situations they all got stuck into, the trailer shows various clips of him dying in other movies.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The Honest Trailer for It (2017) points out how Ben and Mike barely have any character development in comparisson to the other Losers, despite being main characters in the book. The narrator even draws parallels betwen Mike and Winston from Ghostbusters (1984).
  • The Honest Trailer for Avengers: Infinity War points out how Black Panther and Wakanda's limited screentime reveals how nobody predicted how big his solo movie would be.
  • The Honest Trailer for Toy Story 4 points out how none of the other returning toys from the previous movies (apart from Bo Peep) get much screen time, and most of their lines consist of saying Woody and Buzz's names.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Warwick Davis's name is repeated four times in the casting list for Harry Potter.
  • Every use of Stock Footage in Superman IV.
  • Jurassic Park, starring the guy from Jurassic Park.
  • The Empire Strikes Back earns the title "The Empire Strikes Back of Star Wars".
  • In the Doki Doki Literature Club! trailer, all of the girls are credited as "Just Monika".
  • In the Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin trailer, the end of the "Starring" part has several characters being credited as "Chaos", in reference to the game's reveal trailer having excessive mentions of "Chaos".
• Depending on the Writer: Due to Honest Trailers and Honest Game Trailers being written by different groups (Screen Junkies for the former, Smosh Games then Fandom Games(made up of former Smosh Games writers) for the latter), both series don't share the same view on the same subject even if they shared the same narrator. For example:
  • In the Honest Game Trailer for the Mortal Kombat games, the narrator praises Mortal Kombat: The Movie as one of the best video games movies while it's sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, sucks, yet in the Honest Trailer for both the Mortal Kombat movies, the narrator says both movies suck.
  • Due to fan backlash for the 2016 Ghostbusters Reboot, the Honest Trailer for Ghostbusters II refrains from making any criticism of the movie until its release, yet the Honest Game Trailer for Ghostbusters: The Video Game didn't have such restraints and predicted that the 2016 reboot was going to suck. (Funny enough, Honest Game Trailers were right when Screen Junkies finally did a Honest Trailer for the 2016 reboot and admit the movie did suck).
• Derailing Love Interests: In The Hunger Games movie trailers, the narrator keeps on labelling Peeta as a plain, useless load, clearly preferring Gale over him.
• Designated Hero: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Fifty Shades Freed describes Christian and Anastasia as the villains of their own movie because of their snobbish attitude, the fact that they have armed security and a secret room full of restraints and torture devices as well as the vague nature of Christian's company and what exactly it does.
  • The Honest Trailer for Waterworld goes out of it's way with a lengthy montage to show what a jerk the Mariner actually is, with the narrator wondering why we're supposed to root for him.
  • The Honest Trailer for Iron Fist (2017) really doesn't shy away from how much the narrator really doesn't like Danny Rand, between him being completely clueless about modern society, bankrupting his family's corporation, mistreating Colleen and getting her to shut down her kendo school, allowing the civilization he swore to protect to be destroyed and accidentally helping start a gang war.
    Narrator: Oh, it's a good thing you're pretty.
• Designated Villain: invoked
  • In the Honest Trailer for Pokémon Black and White, the narrator is surprised that the villains of the game, Team Plasma, are an Animal Wrongs Group that actually addresses the ethical issues of putting Pokemon in balls and making them fight each other.
  • The Honest Trailer for Starship Troopers points out how it's kind of hard not to feel sorry for the bugs even though they serve as the bad guys:
    Narrator: Evil space bugs are on the attack because they hate our freedom, or because we started colonizing their planet; toma-toe, toma-toh.
• Destructive Saviour:
  • For The Dark Knight, Batman, "a silent guardian who doesn't give a f*ck about racking up millions of dollars in peoples' personal damages".
  • The sheer amount of property damage caused by Superman in Man of Steel.
    Narrator: It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... coming right for us, everybody run!
• "Die Hard" on an X: In the Honest Trailer for Die Hard, they list all the various movies inspired by it. And call the movie Die Hard in a Building.
• Director Displacement: invoked The trailer for The Nightmare Before Christmas points out how odd it is that the movie is called Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas even though the credits don't make it clear what exactly his part in creating the movie was (for the record, he conceived the story and was the producer):
  Narrator: From visionary director Tim Burton... [shows the credits of the film, that read "Directed by Henry Selick"] I mean, from writer Tim Burton? [credits read "Screenplay by Caroline Thompson"] Uh, with music and lyrics by Tim Burton? [credits read "Music and Lyrics by Danny Elfman"] No? Well what did he do?!
  • This issue is brought up again in the honest trailer for every Tim Burton movie, which points out how, despite his big repertoire, people still associate Tim Burton most with the one movie he did not direct; The Nightmare before Christmas.
• Dirty Old Man: In the How It Should Have Ended crossover of Star Trek Into Darkness, Spock Prime receives a picture of Uhura in a bikini in exchange for telling the past crew of the Enterprise about future threats (based on the original Star Trek movies).
• Disney Death:
  • Noted in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with at least four different characters all suddenly turning out to still be alive, in an "awesome twist they run into the ground. [...] Still great, though!"
  • The Honest Trailer for No Time to Die predicts that Bond will turn out to have survived his apparent death in a missile strike, especially since the movie credits say "James Bond will return".
    Narrator: It's pretty clear this man is immune to explosions at this point. [montage of Bond surviving other, smaller explosions] The guy explodes himself a little bit each morning to build up an immunity; he'll be back.
• Disneyfication: Pointed out throughout the Honest Trailer for Pocahontas, which points out its many changes to the history of the real Pocahontas, who was 12 years old at the time and was kidnapped and taken to England in real life, and how it ignores how a period of starvation and disease was just around the corner after the story took place.
  Narrator: If I don't look it up, it's like it never happened!
• Disney Villain Death: Noted in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes with Koba, even coupling that scene with a montage of villains falling to their deaths.
• Distinction Without a Difference: The Honest Trailer for Frozen II says it's nothing like Disney's previous mediocre invokedDirect to Video sequels... because it got a theatrical release.
• Distracted by the Sexy: All over the place in Avatar. "Meet Neytiri, but most importantly, meet her side bluebs."
  Narrator: As you're force-fed the most obvious message ever, it will leave you wondering, "Did I see her nipple?"
• Divided for Adaptation: The Honest Trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 describes Lionsgate, which also own the movie rights to Divergent, as having "casually redefined the word 'trilogy'", referring to their plans of splitting the last book in the respective trilogies into two movies to stretch out the movie series.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Breaking Bad, "the show so powerful you binge-watch it on Netflix, so all-consuming you push it on your friends even if they don't watch TV, and so addicting you can't shut up about it..."
    Narrator: It's basically like drugs.
  • The Honest Trailer for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer suggests that Hermey's dream of becoming a dentist is supposed to be code for him being secretly gay.
  • The Honest Trailer for Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power draws parallels between the series' plot and The War on Terror:
    Narrator: ...it's a story where a terrorist from across the sea knocks down two symbols of Elven power. They respond by invading the Middle E, kill a bunch of Orcs who had nothing to do with it, and refuse to leave until they suck up all the underground resources and turn them into red, white and blue weapons. [Beat] Wait, are we... Are we the baddies here?
• Developing Doomed Characters: The trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong has the narrator rant about how many human subplots the movie has, even though most of these characters die at some point.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: invoked
  • The Honest Trailer for Starship Troopers points out how, even though the movie satirizes the kind of militarized society it features, some things about life in its military come off as pretty cool:
    Narrator: ...because even though they're making fun of how dumb this culture is, who wouldn't want to play some taser-tag, then cool of with a nice co-ed shower? Just look at all these soapy Privates' soaped-up privates!
  • The Honest Trailer for Reefer Madness and The Big Lebowski points out how the former, despite being a notorious anti-weed PSA, accidentally makes it look cool by showing that it's cheap, easy to grow and gets the main character laid.
    Narrator: Man, I wish that were true in real life. Way to make pot look even better, movie!
• Double Take: The Narrator's reaction to this line from Interstellar.
  Dr. Brand: Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.
  Narrator: All right, all right, all-what? Wait, what?!
• Double Standard: Discussed in The Stinger of the Fantastic Four (2005) trailer.
  Narrator: Make a Mexican woman put on a blonde wig and blue contacts to play Sue Storm, and no one bats an eye. Cast a black guy as the Human Torch, and everyone loses their minds!
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: One of their big criticisms of Revenge of the Sith is that almost the entire Jedi Order gets killed off disgracefully by clone soldiers despite previously having cut down armies of worse foes effortlessly.
• Dueling Works:
  • Invoked and referenced in the Armageddon (1998) trailer.
    Narrator: Gear up for the best film about drilling into an asteroid and nuking it, since the one that came out two months earlier.
  • While describing the movie's love interest, the Honest Trailer for Paul Blart: Mall Cop references Observe and Report, a movie with a similar premise that came out around the same time:
    Narrator: Anna Faris shines as the charming mall staffer on whom our hero develops a massive crush... in the other 2009 comedy about a mall cop who gets in over his head.
• Dull Surprise:
  • Their largest criticism of the actors of The Twilight Saga, especially Kristen Stewart.
    Narrator: Is every director afraid of telling her to close her mouth?
  • Regarding Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) in Fifty Shades Darker:
    Narrator: Watch as she spends an entire movie attempting in vain to show human emotion.
  • The Honest Trailer for Season One of The Mandalorian describes Cara Dune (Gina Carano) as having "less range than the guy in the helmet".

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