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If Covers Always Lie, trailers can, too. Sometimes Tonight Someone Dies or hyping The Reveal might not be enough. And with the Internet an open window these days for writers and directors to viewers' likes, dislikes, hopes, predictions, and Shipping loyalties, it's easy to know exactly how to bait fans into watching the next episode. Be careful not to believe everything you see, though, because as all Fan Vid makers know, any scene can be mixed-and-matched with another to look completely different from their real context. (Indeed, the creation of fake trailers to make a movie look like it's from a completely different genre has become one of the Internet's most beloved recent art forms, such as The Shining as a happy romantic comedy, the one that started it all, or Mary Poppins as a slasher horror flick.)

In the worst examples, it'll actually drive away those who would have otherwise watched, by completely confusing the relevant demographic.

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Specific types:

• Ship Tease
  • Tonight Someone Kisses
  • Bait And Switch Lesbians
• Super Dickery

Often a form of Misaimed Marketing. Contrast with Trailers Always Spoil, where the trailer is a little too honest. If it's a TV show's Title Sequence that lies, those are Bait And Switch Credits.

---

Examples:

Live Action TV

• A trailer for the newest season of Law And Order Special Victims Unit used a shot of Olivia looking surprised with a shot of Elliot and Dani about to kiss, adding up to sexual tension at its max. In the actual episode, Olivia never saw the kiss, which was just an accidental quickie after the two had a few drinks. The trailer made more fans squee than the episode.
• Nowadays, "On The Next" TV trailers will often include footage and plot points that don't actually appear for several weeks yet. This is particularly egregious in Prison Break-style shows with heavy continuity, as it can give the impression of the story progressing more quickly than it really does. Heroes is a major offender here; for example, it incorporated material from the entire first season into the trailer for the second episode.
• In the middle of the Jasmine arc of Angel, an On The Next centered around Angel and Fred kissing, with the announcer going on about how the crisis will drive them together... in the actual episode, the kiss turns out to be a Fake Out Make Out and no romance comes of it.
• A trailer for the 2007 Doctor Who episode "The Family Of Blood" showed John Smith (the Doctor in amnesic human form) getting married and having children. In the episode itself, this was just a Last Temptation to the life he could have if he didn't turn back into his usual self.
  • And in the trailer for the episodes to come after the episode 'Fear Her', viewers are lead to believe, with narration from the character herself, that Rose is going to die. Then it just turns out she's listed among the dead after the Battle of Canary Wharf because she was never seen again, after ending up safe and sound, but trapped, on an alternate Earth along with her family. So she did die - legally, anyway.
  • 2008 and the tradition continues strong with even the title of "The Doctor's Daughter". Even apart from the trailer itself. She is in fact his parthenogenic offspring extrapolated from his DNA. His daughter, but not in the usual way.
  • It also put way too much emphasis on the handsprings some gymnast performed through lasers. That was just a three-second thing with no importance to the plot whatsoever, except to show that the Doctor's clone/some gymnast can do that.
  • Lets not get started on Turn Left and just say that the only thing that Doctor Who trailers tell us these days is the title of the episode and a few big shocks that WON'T happen in the episode.
• One Star Trek Voyager episode trailer was particularly bad in this respect, being designed around the line "He violated me" in such a way as to make it sound very much as though Seven was going to be raped by a crew member; the trailer even featured a "Who did it?" sequence with flashes of various male crew members' faces. The actual episode, however, was just about an alien culture trapping her in a laboratory for study and stealing some of her nanoprobes.
  • This might be justifable, though, when you consider the episode goes a little Does This Remind You Of Anything with the plot. With borg nanoprobes replacing date rape.
  • In regards to Voyager, a website designed to nitpick the show refers to this phenomenon as PAL, for Previews Always Lie. See here.
  • In a comparatively minor case, SPIKE's trademark preview for Voyager makes it out to be an action-packed, phasers-firing thrill ride. "Network for Men" and all that.
    • Actually, Voyager's action quotient is such that it's not entirely unwarranted. Now, when they tried to do the same with The Next Generation...
  • This Troper remembers seeing a trailer for some season 7 Voyager episode during its run that featured Kim saying "Ambassador Spock" in a shocked voice, leading me and (I would assume) many in the audience to tune in in hopes that everyone's favorite Vulcan would show up. As it turns out, Spock was mentioned briefly in one conversation and that 'shocked take' wasn't even in the episode.
  • The trailer for one Deep Space Nine episode showed the Enterprise being destroyed... or so we thought. Turns out it's a ship of the same class, called the Odyssey. (Keep in mind that this episode aired right after TNG ended, and this was waaay before DS9's battles between fleets, which would often have a few Galaxy-classes about.)
    • Actually, the producers of the show may have intended this one: they chose a ship like the Enterprise to get destroyed to put over how powerful the new enemy (the Jem'Hadar) were - the trailer, in this case, actually enhanced what they were trying to do anyway. See The Worf Effect.
  • Final Star Trek spin-off example: UK TV channel Virgin 1 markets Star Trek Enterprise on the basis of the handful of relatively sexy moments that make up the four seasons. While it might have featured more blatant sexual situations than the previous Star Trek series, the show was still pretty tame by most modern standards.
• During the early 00s, the British Soap Opera Eastenders featured a number of intentionally misleading trailers. For example, one suggested that Saskia would kill club owner Steve; when the actual episode rolled around, the exact opposite happened. Much later, after Matthew was framed by Steve for Saskia's murder, a specially-filmed trailer suggested that Matthew would get his revenge by setting up explosive death traps -- in reality, his actual revenge plan was slightly less violent.
• In a particularly egregious example, FOX's promo monkeys tried to make a contestant's brief moment of discomfort on Don't Forget the Lyrics much more dramatic than it actually was. (Source)
  • And also promoting the same show, they managed to combine this with Trailers Always Spoil: The promos said that a contestant would win more money than anyone else, and said contestant only actually tied for the biggest win.
• Played with in Arrested Development, in which the clips at the end of each episode were almost never actually featured in the next, but sometimes became important in their own right (for instance, Maggie isn't blind).
  • Also, in one third-season episode, trailers advertised 3-D (a thrown tomato and a character's entrance, for about five seconds total footage), that "the shocking final moments" would be live (three decidedly non-shocking words), and that "one of these people will die" (a hateful Spear Carrier who flashes by so quickly you might not notice...and the narrator tells the audience when she appears in-show).
• A preview for the Lost episode "Stranger in a Strange Land" promised that three huge questions would be answered in it. These turned out to be the meaning of Jack's tattoos (something few people wondered about, knowing they were the actor's real tattoos and thus didn't have to mean anything), what happened to the children the Others kidnapped (they're... with the Others!) and what happened to Cindy the flight attendant (ditto, making it much more of an addition to the last question than one in its own right).
• This troper recalls a preview for an episode of ER where a main character seems to suffer a very serious heart attack, with ominous music and worried onlookers. In the actual episode it turns out to simply be gas.
• At the end of a season finale for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, there was a long preview hyping the next season's premiere, saying that Buffy would face her deadliest, strongest, most legendary foe ever... Dracula. The hype blitz continued during the entire off season, with every Buffy rerun containing a promo for the Buffy vs. Dracula showdown, commercials for it even ran in unconnected commercial spots, often during primetime. In all, it was built up as Dracula obviously being the Big Bad for the coming season, or perhaps even multiple seasons, so epic was the ad campaign for the upcoming meeting. When the episode finally came... it was a one-shot, essentially a gag episode, where Dracula's arrival was treated largely as a joke and Buffy doesn't actually defeat him, but essentially mocks him into laying down and playing dead. He was never heard from on the TV series again, reappearing only in comics once or twice. Hard to say whether it was just a really deceptive ad campaign or a rather mean-spirited Take That. (A more charitable interpretation is that it was a deliberate and largely successful attempt to distract the fans and preserve the surprise of the season's real plot arc.)
• There's a trailer for Supernatural which makes it look like Dean set Jessica on fire.
• The trailer for the US version of Life On Mars is shot like a Starsky and Hutch parody. Seriously, watch it.
  • This seems entirely in keeping with the UK version.
• A trailer for an episode of Hell's Kitchen Season 4 did a rather spectacular version of this. The trailer showed that one chef sliced off a portion of his thumb, the team couldn't find it, and mentioned that two professional critics were attending that night's service - with the narrator all but saying that the severed portion of finger would end up on a critic's plate. As it turned out, the finger incident happened in the first part of the show, and was already resolved by the time dinner service rolled around - there was never any risk involved.
  • The trailer for the final episode of Season 1 featured a clip of Michael yelling "Piss off!", but it was almost made to look like he was fighting with Ralph; when the episode actually aired, it was revealed that Michael was simply imitating Chef Ramsey's mannerisms, and Ralph was laughing along with it. This troper banged her head against the desk.
• An interesting case on Battlestar Galactica: the trailer featured D'Anna telling Roslin that she's the final Cylon who has yet to be revealed. However, the cut revealing who she was talking to caused some speculation that Roslin actually wasn't the person she said it to. It turned out D'Anna was talking to Roslin, but was just playing a prank on her. Of course, had Roslin been the final Cylon this would have been a major case of Trailers Always Spoil.
  • A trailer for the second half of Season Three had Dee saying, "I'm going to bring Starbuck back to Apollo" in a cheery way. In the actual episode "Rapture", she said it with resignation.
• This troper once saw a preview for an episode of Stargate SG-1 revolving around the team being trapped in an unpleasant version of a Lotus Eater Machine, with the trailer using Carter's line "How do we know this is real?" as if it were a serious question and dramatic concern. In the actual episode, this is just the set-up for a final joke to cap off what's otherwise a particularly dark episode.
• The trailers for the NBC miniseries Merlin implied there was going to be a big huge battle between the title character and Queen Mab. In reality, while there was some shrieking, a few fireballs thrown, and other cool magical effects, the whole thing actually ended with everyone just turning their backs on her and forgetting her, refusing to believe in her. A very effective and creative way to defeat a villain, but it was probably rather disappointing for those who wanted to see Mab turned into a crispy critter.
  • But why quibble over such a trailer deception when Mab wasn't even involved in the source material anyway? Whether this is also an example of Adaptation Distillation or Adaptation Decay is up for debate--on the one hand, the writers did make a LOT of changes from the original Arthurian cycle; on the other hand, even setting aside whether those changes were improvements or not, the original stories themselves suffered from a great deal of decay over time due to various Retcons, Retooling, and outright bowdlerising by both the Victorians (Tennyson) and Malory.

Western Animation

• Shipping was also taken advantage of in the very first trailer for the second season finale of Avatar The Last Airbender by exploiting familiarity with the Locked In A Room trope. Later trailers served to help put the wham into the outcome of the finale.
  • They're doing it again with the trailer for the second half of Season 3. Somewhat disappointingly, fans are falling for it.
• Parodied in the trailer for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, which gives a long list of things that do not appear in the movie.
• This troper saw a Cartoon Network trail for "The Woody Woodpecker Show" which consisted entirely of classic Woody clips, and thought that CN was going to put more classic toons on, a reverse of the trend which had seen classics dwindled to just Tom and Jerry. Instead, it turned out to be a modern revival of Woody (which this troper had never even heard of before).
• All of the trailers for Kung Fu Panda made it out to be a slapstick, comedic parody in the same vein as most of Dream Works's animated features (and, sadly, a lot of studio cartoons these days). Granted, this could be excused by the fact that the title character is voiced by Jack Black--but considering his usual style of acting and choice in film roles, this would seem to be a very strong example of Misaimed Marketing twice over--most fans of Jack Black's usual work would not go to see him in an animated feature, and most parents would not want their kids to see an animated feature which starred Jack Black. In any case, the movie instead turned out to be a pretty serious, epic action film with almost mythic proportions at times.
  • The comedy was all still there, not made up, but spaced out and used as comic relief to lighten the tension. Which means people coming to the film solely for Jack Black comedy were probably disappointed, and those who might have enjoyed the action never got a chance to see it because they were driven away by the trailers. This editor's roommate was almost one of those, and he himself would not have been as interested or determined to see it if he hadn't read The Art of Kung Fu Panda at a bookstore. Let's hope word of mouth will get around this faulty ad campaign.
• The Sopranos tended to do this a lot, with the trailers playing up the mob violence that was rarely the center of the upcoming episode.

Film A common ploy in misleading film trailers is to exploit the viewers' familiarity with the main performer's work (or that of the director, or even the studio), or recent films that seem similar on the surface. For example:

• Fans of the book will know Bridge To Terabithia is not a fantasy adventure story, as depicted in the trailers for the movie (released the spring after the first Narnia movie), but more of a tale about bonding between two friends. The screenwriters have stated that they are not pleased with the way the film was marketed, and the actual movie is much more faithful to the book.
  • This troper, who saw the movie without even knowing about the book's existence and thought the movie was about some silly magical happy friendship story, thought that Leslie dying was a huge emotional kick in the balls. Never Trust A Trailer!
  • That was supposed to be a huge emotional kick in the balls. Nice children's book. (This troper read it as a child)
• The trailer for the movie version of The Bicentennial Man made it look like a goofy comedy about a family and their robot (it did, after all, star comedian Robin Williams as the robot); all clips were taken from the first fifteen minutes or so of the two-hour movie.
  • Likewise, the trailers for Jack played it up as a Big-like comedy, all because Robin Williams was in it. The actual movie? One big Tear Jerker.
• M. Night Shyamalan's Lady In The Water, while marketed as a horror movie (a genre Shyamalan has been well-known for), is actually a semi-metafictional fantasy story with only a few moments of suspense.
  • This was also true for another of his films, The Village. Its trailers present it as a scary horror film while in truth it's nothing but a drama/love story movie. Albeit with a couple of Shyamalan's trademark twists.
• Disney's film Snow Dogs was marketed with scenes of the titular animals talking and joking, cartoon style - which only occurs during a Dream Sequence had by Cuba Gooding Jr.'s main character.
• Similarly, the film Kangaroo Jack was marketed with scenes of a wisecracking, talking kangaroo who only appears during a hallucination had by one of the main characters; the titular kangaroo does not talk, and the film is not as kid-friendly as one would get the impression of from the trailer.
• A lot of trailers end up with scenes that don't make it into the final movie, because the final cut of the movie isn't done when the trailer is made. In some cases, the trailer looks like it has scenes from the movie but doesn't. For example, the trailer for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was shot on the film's set with the film's actors, but the footage was intended solely for the trailer and does not appear in the film at all.
  • A trailer for The Pagemaster showed Macaulay Culkin's character receiving a sword that floated down from the library ceiling. It was really cool looking, but wasn't in the film at all.
  • Some of the trailers for Superman Returns showed the destruction of Krypton, and a shot of Clark's ship travelling over rough terrain. In the final cut, the story picks up after he arrives on Earth.
• The Ghost parody in Naked Gun 2 1/2 was originally only meant for the trailer. It was so well-received that director David Zucker (whose brother Jerry had directed Ghost) worked it into the actual movie. (Source, scroll down)
  • The trailer for Uncle Buck had two scenes that were never in the movie. One being where John Candy is shaving his face and the other one is where he tells the parents how he's taking care of the children.
• None of the lines heard in the (heavily redubbed) trailer for Spaced Invaders were actually in the movie.
• Three words: Little Miss Sunshine. The title is probably supposed to be ironic, but the trailer certainly didn't make that clear.
• The dramatic thriller Red Eye was named for the fact that it mostly takes place on a red eye (late night or early morning) airline flight. Trailers for the movie took footage from the film and used special effects to make the antagonist's eyes glow red in an attempt to attract undue interest.
  • Also, the trailers usually tricked you into thinking it was a chick flick, until halfway through, when they'd usually play the "My business is all about you" clip.
• The movie Goodbye Lenin was marketed on being a comedy with the outrageous concept of the main character making it appear the Communist world never fell for his ailing mother. In reality, it's an arthouse movie with very little humour in between the genuine drama of the son's Byzantine schemes. Given that it's a German film, this editor ought to have expected it...
• Multiple commercials for Reign Of Fire ended with Matthew McConaughey's character leaping off a tower tower straight at the dragon with an ax screaming at the top of his lungs. Just see what happens in the movie.
• Two trailers were made for Solaris, one making it look like an action-adventure, the other focusing on the romance story. The film may have failed due to audiences expecting such types of movies, instead of the philosophical, dialogue-heavy film it turned out to be.
• The trailer for Cry_Wolf makes the film out to have a much higher body count than it actually has. The film is actually best described as a "faux-slasher" and was rated 12 in the UK. The publicity probably contributed to the film not doing well at the box office. That's not saying it's a bad film. This contributor knew this before he watched it and enjoyed it more because of it.
• Ever since a film student won a contest by recutting a trailer for the horror classic The Shining and making it look like a family-friendly rom-com, it's become a meme to recut movie trailers to represent the opposite genre of the actual film. Examples: The Ten Commandments re-mixed as a teen movie, Top Gun written as if it was a gay love story, 300 re-mixed as a PG movie, Citizen Kane with rap music, Back to the Future as a story of personal discovery, and don't forget Mary Poppins as a horror movie.
  • Wait, Top Gun isn't a gay love story?
  • Quite a few have also been remixed as horror films, such as: Toy Story, Pinocchio, Sky High, Lion King, Cinderella, The Incredibles, Shrek, Willy Wonka, The Wizard of Oz, School of Rock, Titanic and The Cat in the Hat.
  • A particularly creepy (and good) one is A Goofy Movie, recut as a Drug Thriller. This is simply because if you watch A Goofy Movie, it really IS about Max being troublesome and Goofy trying to reconnect with him. But it's SUPPOSED to be a kid's comedy.
• A trailer in 2002 advertised the film Lucky Star, directed by Michael Mann and starring Benicio Del Toro as a professional gambler milking vast amounts of money from casinos and the stock market before drawing the attention of government agents. Turned out that there was never going to be a film at all -- the whole thing was actually an advert for the new Mercedes SL, his getaway car.
  • At least where this editor lives, the new Volvo S80 also used a film-trailer-style TV ad.
  • Newsflash: LG just pulled this stunt with its new Scarlet line of TVs.
  • This particular variant was parodied by Samsung in a fake trailer promoting smartphone. "No Guns", "No Romance", "No Plot", "Just Phone". "The Greatest Product Placement Movie of All Time".
• Terminator 2 featured a promotional campaign designed to play off of the motives of the T-800 model from the first film. An early trailer, made specifically for the purpose, showed an Arnold Schwarzenegger model of the T-800 being built and looking sinister at the end. The second phase of the marketing showed both Terminators, but didn't mention which one was good and which one was evil. In the end, it was the Arnold character that was the protector, and the T-1000 was the enemy.
  • Except that, given the first film, we expect Arnie to be the bad guy and the other one to be a human protector, and in fact the first twenty minutes of the film are dedicated to reinforcing that misconception. So it's really more a case of Trailers Always Spoil.
• Trailers for Chasing Amy make it look like the plot is a man fruitlessly chasing after a lesbian (who isn't even named Amy, as it turns out); he gets her halfway through, and the bulk of the movie is an exploration of sexual self-definition.
• The trailer for the 1987 movie The Gate included every single special effect in the entire film except one.
• The trailer for The Negotiator featured Kevin Spacey saying something akin to "Now you have to deal with both of us" a line that would have indicated the movie taking a much different route than it actually did. While not a memorable movie, this editor still feels ripped off.
• Rare example of this being done for a movie that doesn't exist: One of the fake trailers in Grindhouse, entitled "Don't!", is filmed so that you never hear the characters talking, and wouldn't know they were British. Many horror films (especially Hammer Horror) of the '70s were marketed to Americans in this way.
  • On a similar note, this editor has seen a few advertisements for foreign-language films along similar lines, with no dialogue to give away that they are subtitled or dubbed! (I recall a few people being very confused to find out that Pans Labyrinth was actually in Spanish...)
    • There are stories of video stores getting so exasperated with people complaining about this that they put up notices that say PAN'S LABYRINTH IS IN SPANISH AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE to head them off.
    • what? no mention of the fact Pan's Labyrinth seemed to be marketed as a family friendly fantasy adventure a la Narnia? This Troper seeing the movie was entertained watching half the theater ushering their traumatized kids out after a character gets his mouth sliced open with a straight razor
  • This troper worked in a movie theater during the release of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon'', which had record numbers of refunded tickets to disappointed (but surprisingly not agitated) parents of young children who couldn't keep up with the movie/read at all (not sure why these kids are being brought into a PG-13 movie, but that's not my job.)
    • The movie theater this troper worked at had a similar problem when the French movie Brotherhood of the Wolf came out. While well liked by the staff, we eventually began telling people up front that the movie was subtittled in order to avoid having to give refunds 10 minutes into the movie.
    • This troper's parents were surprised at how she kept up with the subtitles in Crouching Tiger, when she was about eight when she saw it. Her parents also rented Princess Mononoke seemingly by the fact that it was animated so that we could watch it around the same time. Needless to say, I think they must have been shocked at the violence, but might also have been worried that we found the head-shot-off-by-arrow bit at the beginning to be hilarious.
• In order to explain what one of the characters does later, in the film Used Cars, there is a scene where it tells how honest they are, Kurt Russell says to a woman, "I want you to get up on that stand, and lie." While she does in fact do this, that scene never appears in the film.
• This editor saw a dozen people walk out of the Tim Burton film Sweeney Todd because the movie's publicity campaign said nothing about it being a musical, apparently missing the fact that quite a few of Burton's films (including the ones that aren't film versions of Broadway musicals) are musicals anyway.
  • A lot of trailers for recent movie musicals have little to no singing.
• The trailer for Lord Of War made it out to be more of an action comedy than the super-depressing drama it ended up being.
• The initial TV ads for Good Luck Chuck place all of their emphasis on Jessica Alba's clumsiness, making the movie out to be a slapstick romantic comedy (more so, at any rate, than it actually is). The titular "good luck" curse, where Chuck sleeps with a woman and the next man she meets is her "true love," is never mentioned. They did eventually start running commercials that focused on the curse, though.
• Clips for a Network broadcast of Spanglish show Adam Sandler screaming in his typical wacky fashion at super-sexy Spaniard Paz Vega, completely misrepresenting the tone of the film.
• When the film No Reservations was coming out in theaters, there were two trailers for it. One hyped up the "romantic comedy" angle, leaving the plot of the main female character having to care for her newly-orphaned niece completely out, as if she didn't exist; another trailer, oddly enough usually shown much later at night, mostly did the reverse, focusing on the niece and only including a few shots of her tension with the guy as if he were just a minor complication to the whole thing. Now that it's coming out on DVD, the trailers used are for the "all romantic comedy" version, and the other side has been completely omitted.
• There's the 1954 animated movie version of Orwell's Animal Farm which faithfully followed the novel... and then there's the 1999 made-for-TV version after a teleplay by some guy named Alan Janes, with talking animatropic animals, voiced by actors. And, um, it's apparently marketed for children, because you know... cute animals. The basic story by Orwell is still there, but the title cover and the marketing slogans both try to pretend it's a family movie(!) in the vein of "Babe, the Gallant Pig" (1995). Compare the Babe cover with that of the live-action Animal Farm. See the resemblance?
• This editor very much hopes not to be the only one who remembers the early teaser trailers for "ET the Extra-terrestrial" that focused on the creepy alien POV sequence from the woodland escape scene, complete with chilling music and a creepy atmosphere, which gave the impression that ET was to be a sci-fi horror film.
• The original trailers and commercials for Resurrecting the Champ portrayed the growing bond between Samuel L. Jackson's homeless ex-champion and Josh Harnett's newspaper reporter and the latter's reconnection with his own family. This is actually what the movie is about. But, inexplicably, a couple weeks before the opening, the trailers shifted to portray what looked like a "One man crusade for justice" on behalf of the Jackson character.
• One trailer for Spider-Man 2 actually used scenes from the movie to make it look like Peter Parker admits he is Spider-Man.
• The trailer for Cold Creek Manor made it seem like the house was haunted. Instead, it was just some crazy guy messing with the family.
• The Sky trailer this troper saw for The Pursuit of Happyness made it out to be a comedy. It certainly isn't.
• As American Football is not a very popular sport in the UK, trailers for Leatherheads completely disguised the fact that it is a sports movie, which leaves the title very, very bizarre.
• Subversion: One of the trailers for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is set up as the Guide's entry on movie trailers, detailing tricks such the inclusion of shots of violent explosions and scantily-clad women which do not appear in the actual movie. (Cue fireballs and babes..)
• The trailers for In Bruges make it sound like a harmless little comedy about fugitives. It really, really isn't.
• It's not the trailer, but the synopsis on the back of the DVD for Raising Helen is worded very carefully. The film itself is about a glamorous career woman (Kate Hudson) who takes on the guardianship of her orphaned nieces and nephew. The rest of the film is dedicated to validating the expression "you don't raise children, children raise you" (hence the title) with a token love interest (John Corbett) thrown in for good measure. The DVD description only mentions two parts of this, (a) that Hudson is a glamorous career woman and (b) that John Corbett is her love interest.
  • Similarly, the Netflix summary for M mentions that it's about a pedophile serial killer being hunted down by the Berlin underworld, which is being blamed for his crimes. It neglects to mention the rather significant fact that of those, the serial killer is the protagonist.
• The film Syriana was marketed as though it were an almost mad-maxesque thriller set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, and was full of stuff blowing up. In fact, the film was a dense, multilingual, brilliantly acted ensemble piece on the effects of oil politics on a whole swath of people from totally divergent backgrounds. Nobody saw it though, because the faux-thriller trailers drove away most of the people who would have actually liked it, but had just enough politics in them to also scare away those who like action flicks.
  • Either that or George Clooney's usual fare just isn't as popular as it used to be.
• This troper almost decided not to see Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind after one particular bad ad made it look like some sort of madcap comedy starring Jim Carrey, despite having already read a review that made the troper want to watch it. Only the troper's faith in newspaper journalists saved the day.
• Who can forget the early trailer for Star Trek: Generations? It gave the impression that Captain Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise-D to help Picard and his crew fight off a Klingon Bird of Prey. Of course, it probably jolted audiences when they actually saw the film and witnessed what happened to Kirk.
• The trailer for We're Back! A Dinosaur Story had the rather terrifying Circus Of Fear scene which didn't actually appear in the movie but in the novelisation of the movie it did. It was also advised by Speilberg himself that "you should take your kids to see this movie instead of Jurassic Park".
  • HUH. I remember watching the movie and seeing a nice sequence of the dinos being brainwashed into monsters and being exhibited at the circus.
• The trailer for Man of the Year, a film starring Robin Williams, makes the film look like a comedy. It is actually mostly a drama about a comedic talkshow host (think Jon Stewart) who runs for president... and gets elected half an hour in. The trailer also hides that it isn't only about him; it gives no hint of a more critical & dramatic plot in the film. This troper dislikes films that are primarily about hilarity ensuing, and so didn't want to see this film--but, having seen the film, loves it.
  • Opposite is true for this troper, though (to be fair, I never saw the trail and I was watching solely because I heard it had Robin Williams). Plus, the computer glitch that some people (and the trailer) are trying to cover up doesn't even really make sense. Maybe the execs do have a point...
• Spoofed in an ad for Starship Troopers on Showtime. The trailer begins by making it seem like a normal coming of age story before the transition, "...as a young man learns what he was born to do...KICK THE CRAP OUT OF MAN EATING ALIEN MUTANT BUGS!" as it switches to the action scenes.
  • Or perhaps it wasn't such a spoof after all.
• The trailer for The Prince Of Egypt implied it as a very action-oriented animated movie. It wasn't of course - it was a religious story about everything from the birth of Moses to parting the Red Sea (well, as much as a kid's movie can be religious). Disappointment ensues.
• The suspense thriller Hush had a trailer of the 'includes scenes shot but eventually cut from the final version' variety. Images which appeared included an overhead shot down a spiral staircase of a body being taken away on a gurney under a sheet; a shot which implied the son confronted his mother about her sinister doings; an all-out fight scene between Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Lange with shards of a broken mirror; and a climactic battle in a burning barn, complete with rearing horses and a collapsing hayloft. None of this happens at all in the film. Even if the makers are telling the truth about it being cut (and not just made up for the trailer), it's obvious they made the most of their product seeming to be an action movie. It's hard to tell whether including the Genre Shift would have improved or ruined the original movie or not--but this editor was frankly disappointed it was cut/never there to begin with, although the fact the movie instead has a lackluster, trickle-off sort of ending probably didn't help.
• Dune- One of the best trailers this troper has ever seen- how did the botch it so badly?
• The trailer for The Boondock Saints includes a clip of Willem Dafoe's character saying "This could just be the first international mob war," or something to that effect. That line is indeed in the movie, but then three minutes later his theory is immediately shot down.
• The trailer for The Proposition has David Wenham's quote "If you're going to kill one, make sure you bloody well kill them all," placed in such a way as to trick the viewer into thinking that the quote has some relevance to the main plot, regarding the Burns Gang. In the film, it's just a dog-kick regarding his character's views on Aborigine uprisings.
• Sorcerer was marketed as a supernatural thriller since it was produced just after The Exorcist. If fact, its a non-supernatural crime thriller.
• Twister has to be the champ of bait-and-switch trailers. Can you say 'The tire that smashes through the windshield in the trailer but NEVER appears in the film'?
• The recent David Mamet film Redbelt trailers made it look like an action movie that takes place in a mixed martial arts tournament. Now let me reiterate a David Mamet film.
• Minor example: The trailer to Be Kind, Rewind (from the same guy as Eternal Sunshine above) has Jack Black saying "I've got another idea, follow me" placed after Mos Def realizing that his tapes have been wiped. Since Jack's character is crazy, it sounds sensible to think he comes up with the Zany Scheme... until you watch the film and find that it's Mos who comes up with the idea. Jack's line is in there... just before he drags a Hollywood Homely into their scheme so he doesn't have to awkwardly kiss his mechanic.
• The Watchmen trailer appears to be deliberately set up to appear to spoil the death of Rorschach. However, the way it's done (unrelated scenes that just happen to appear related) only seems to "spoil" it for people who've read the graphic novel. Sneaky, sneaky bastards.

Video Games

• Taken to a science by Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima, most notably in the campaign for Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. In MGS2, the main character was going to be the new character Raiden, but the general expectation of the audience, furthered by very selective news releases, was that it would be Solid Snake. Konami released extensive gameplay information and footage, but only from the game's prologue segment, when the player really does control Snake. When video was shown from later in the story (when Raiden would be the main character), footage was edited together, using out-of-context clips and dialogue, to almost completely hide the real main character from the audience -- except for a few teasing flashes of his face behind the mask of a ninja (which turned out to be a completely different character). One scene showing Snake fighting the boss Fortune was footage from a hypothetical sequence serving as a metaphor for the Mind Screw the main character was suffering, and the real battle was fought by Raiden.
• The MGS3 trailers do this trick again, but portray final boss The Boss as a heartless Big Bad, nearly killing Snake and shooting out his eye, causing him to wake up in a cell from a terrible nightmare. In game, the Big Bad was Volgin, who was only shown in the trailer once; the eye was not shot out by The Boss -- she merely pointed a gun at him; and the nightmare wakeup was from a near-comedy sequence resulting from a Dream Sequence minigame.
  • Hideo Kojima claims he hates making trailers, because Trailers Always Spoil. He says the only way out is to make deliberately misleading trailers - hence his embracing of this trope.
• Disgaea both lampshades and subverts this trope within the game itself. The main storyline of the game is broken up into fourteen different episodes. At the end of each episode, Etna narrates a ridiculous trailer for the "upcoming episode", where each one is for a different off-the-wall series starring her as the main character. Examples include "Hyper Dimensional Demon Gal Etna", "Space Detective Etna", and "Fire Chef Cooking Gal Etna".
  • It subverts the trope when one of the crazy trailers is, of course, an entirely accurate preview for the upcoming episode.
    • Then it subverts it again when Etna gives an entirely serious description of the final episode... And the entire cast starts panicking about how this is some sort of harbinger of the apocalypse.
• The trailer for Half Life 2: Episode 2 at the end of Episode 1 implies that Alyx didn't survive the train crash at the end of Episode 1 and this would drive the plot of the second episode. This spectacularly fails to happen.
  • To be fair she is grievously wounded a few minutes into the game, and you spend a significant chunk of it trying to save her life. It wasn't a total dodge.

Anime

• The trailer for the fourth Naruto movie seems to strongly have this going. For those interested, the tagline is (Warning!: Crazy insane spoiler) "Naruto Dies".
  • Obviously, Naruto doesn't actually die, but the movie does center a good deal on the theme.
• Cartoon Network's advertisements for Tenchi Muyo were infamous in this regard. Thanks to the Toonami-style editing that the trailers underwent, Tenchi Muyo was made to appear as an exciting, action-oriented anime full of guns and stuff. While the show does have some action sequences, it is certainly not action-oriented in any way, and the disappointment was reflected in the show's ratings.
  • Mainly because the trailers combined clips from all three of the series' incarnations.
  • Probably the main problem with this was that Toonami is supposed to be an action-cartoon block- they just decided to throw in more anime after they realized it was popular, without regard for how much action there was. Remember when Hamtaro was on Toonami?
• Similarly, a written ad for Tenchi Muyo in Love was "Police officers chase an escaped convict." While technically true... no.
• The trailer for the original Hellsing TV Series not only has almost nothing to do with the plot of the TV series (featuring characters that occur nowhere else in that continuity, such as The Major), but also features a completely different style of music and higher quality/differently styled animation to that which occurs in the series. The problem is that the trailer is based mainly off a volume of the manga (volume 3) that never made it into the TV series.
• Sailor Moon was marketed by the dub company to US TV stations with this tape, informing potential business partners that "Boys will love the non-stop action!" I don't think that's what they loved.
• Much like the Raising Helen example in Films above, the back of some of the DVD boxes for Gravitation are very carefully-worded in just how they summarize the series and its events. It's entirely possible for someone to pick it up without realizing that it's a Boys Love series (especially if you factor in how girly one of the main characters looks).
• Planetes probably does this deliberately with its Post Episode Trailer. While they use clips from the next episode, all of them are stripped of context and out-of-order, making it completely impossible to accurately guess the next episode's contents.
• With every Pokemon movie release the early Japanese teasers and trailers rarely contain scenes in the released film. The most noted one, a silhouette of Mewtwo in the first trailer of the third movie, given that Mewtwo already had a focal movie, the first one. Naturally Mewtwo did not appear in the final film.

Machinima

• Parodied at the end of one episode of Red vs Blue, where they used the typical "next time, somebody will die" speech, breaking between each word to show a potential victim. Each shot is of Grif. Church ends up dying.

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