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Never Trust A Trailer / Live-Action Films
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Naturally, as trailers are most often identified with movies, there's a number of reasons why you can Never Trust a Trailer, especially when it's for a film.

If a trailer is just fibbing for purposes of not spoiling something, then it belongs in Foiler Footage.


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    #0-9 
  • The trailer for 9½ Weeks promotes the film as being a lighthearted romance about two people having the best weeks of their lives falling in love. The film itself is much darker and more brutal than that.
  • This sort of backfired for the movie 40 Days and 40 Nights. The trailer and TV spots had the main character Matt state "No sex for Lent." Cue everybody who does not have sex at least once every forty days roll their eyes and lose interest. The commercials also made it look like it was a light romantic comedy or a chick flick where the guy meets a nice girl. What the commercials omit is that he was supposed to not have sex for Lent, or do anything remotely sexual, which probably would have made Matt more sympathetic to audiences. A large part of the plot is that his friends are taking bets on whether he will make it which causes more problems when various people try to win the bet. The original teaser did flat-out state "No self-gratification" and "no kissing". Maybe it was the only one.

    A 
  • The trailer for About Time suggests that Tim and Mary's entire relationship is eradicated from the timeline, but actually it's only their first meeting.
    • Furthermore, the trailer gives the impression that he erases their meeting by going back in time to prevent his father from dying in a car accident. In fact, it's his sister, not his father, who's involved in a (non-fatal) car accident, and it happens much later in the movie. His father does eventually die, of lung cancer, but there's nothing he can do to prevent it.
  • The trailers for The Adjustment Bureau suggested that Thompson (Terence Stamp) is the primary Adjuster, when really he's only in the second half for four or five scenes. The primary Adjuster is Richardson, played by John Slattery.
  • Admission's trailer is all about an uptight college admissions officer (Tina Fey) meeting an easy-going alternative school principal (Paul Rudd) and falling in love, with an odd moment where she really wants to hold a woman's baby. That's actually important since the reason he wanted to meet her in the first place was because one of his students is the son she gave up for adoption in college, which is either glossed over or not mentioned at all in the trailers.
  • The trailers for The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle downplayed its quirkier elements, making it look like a rather generic family action-adventure film with a few comedic elements. The actual film had several actiony scenes, but tone-wise was more in line with the original Rocky and Bullwinkle show. Furthermore, the trailers also had Bullwinkle saying things like "I'm King of the world!" and "What's uuuuup?" It's likely these lines were going to be used in the film but got removed so the film wouldn't seem too dated. In the actual scenes, he doesn't say anything, and he says "What's the difference?" in a bit of Biting-the-Hand Humor, respectively.
  • Adventureland. Some people thought it was going to be a raunchy teen comedy, and that the trailer that played on Oxygen which played up the Token Romance was the one that lied. Turns out, their relationship does drive the movie, and the movie as a whole is much more subtle and melancholy than was advertised.
  • Alien:
    • One of the most notorious cases of this trope was an early, early teaser trailer for Alien³. It showed an Alien egg floating towards Earth with the line, "In 1979, we discovered in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we would discover on Earth, everyone can hear you scream..." This was all based upon a very early spec script. By the time the movie was actually made, the final film was... a little different. (Sure, the Aliens would eventually get to Earth, just not exactly the way most fans would have liked.)
    • The trailer for AVP: Alien vs. Predator showed an epic moment where three predators were fighting off a handful of aliens. But as the camera moved back that handful turned to thousands of aliens. While this is in the movie, it is only shown in a flashback as one of the main character theorizes that's what had happened in ancient times. The movies also made the plot go along the lines of badass hunter vs badass creature, with poor humans thrown in the middle. The first Predator dies without any real screen time against an Alien. And the third gets impregnated by a facehugger, setting up the plot for the second movie. The only time Aliens and Predators fought was with the second Predator.
    • Alien: Covenant: Several of the trailers and prologue clips have sequences that don't appear in the film itself, and suggest the film is going to be much more character-driven. One of these trailers, "She Won't Go Quietly", positions Daniels as a Ripley-esque Action Girl/Final Girl who takes on the xenomorph on her own. While she's still a resourceful individual in the film proper, she tends to use creative solutions to kill the aliens and isn't ever seen fighting them on her own.
  • An Australian VHS trailer for Alien 2: On Earth features scenes from the film set to excerpts from Jerry Goldsmith's score to Alien in order to pass it off as a direct sequel.
  • One of the trailers for Alvin and the Chipmunks showed a scene where Dave finds something that he thinks is poop that came from Theodore. Alvin tells Dave that it's a raisin, Dave tells Alvin to prove it, and Alvin puts it in his mouth. After Dave leaves, Alvin spits out the poop and says to Theodore, "You owe me big time!" This scene is in the movie, but in the movie version, it's actually Simon who eats the poop, and Alvin is not even in the scene at all. Not only that, but the trailer shows the chipmunks all wearing their trademark shirts in this scene, while in the film version, this takes place before the chipmunks even get their shirts.
    • The first TV trailer for The Squeakquel shows the Chipmunks stopping and seeing the Chipettes singing onstage, and falling in love with them. In the actual flick, said scene is their number from the sing-off competition which doesn't happen until much later. The Chipettes aren't the girls Alvin flirts with during the lunch scene, despite what the trailers would have you believe. And Dave isn't around when the 'Munks spin around in a blender, and they used the scene where he gets re-injured at the very end of the movie.
    • One trailer for The Road Chip shows Theodore singing "Baby Got Back" at a party while Dave and his girlfriend give disgusted reactions. In the actual movie, Theodore sings it at a golf course in front of Miles.
    • A rather infamous sing-along trailer for The Road Chip edits scenes to make it look like that Theodore farts constantly when he only does so once. There's also a scene edited to make it seem that Simon farts once, but he never does so. (He does have a Bring My Brown Pants moment in an airport, though.)
  • The trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man include voice-overs of lines that don't occur in the movie, including lines hinting at plots that didn't occur in the film at all. "Do you think what happened to you, Peter, was an accident? Do you have any idea what you really are?" Nothing related to this line appears in the film.
    • It's been hinted that these were cut, due to negative fan reception about the "secret story" concept.
    • Or how about Conners tempting Peter with news about his parents.
  • They did it again with the trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 including some ominous lines cut and making all of the villains other than Electro appear to have more prominent roles than they actually do. The trailer has a scene where Harry reveals that Oscorp has Peter under surveillance, as well as some lines from Norman Osborn implying that he and Harry have sinister plans for Peter. In reality, Harry doesn't become The Green Goblin until near the end and then fights Spider-Man for about 5 minutes, while Norman dies very early on and never conspires with Harry or threatens Peter. The Rhino doesn't show up until the very last scene in the movie and while the trailer makes it look like we get to see them fight, we only get to see the start of it. The final image of the movie (Spider-Man swinging around a manhole cover) is in the trailer, yet we don't even get to see if it hits Rhino or not. At least some of these discrepancies are due to the film being heavily changed in the editing room, with parts of the film being reshot and others being dropped altogether.
  • In yet another example involving George Clooney, The American was promoted as an action-packed thriller in the vein of the Bourne films. It's actually a very introspective drama about the life of a hired assassin, punctuated only by brief bursts of action.
  • The trailer for Angel Eyes plays the film as a supernatural thriller where the character of Catch (played by Jim Caviezel) is implied to be either a resurrected entity (a la Meet Joe Black) or is hiding a dark secret which he's hiding from Jennifer Lopez's character and could prove to be fatal. But in reality, the film is a romantic drama where the "dark secret" is simply the fact that Catch lost his family in a tragic accident — a plot point that's also spoiled in the trailer.
  • Annapolis is implied to be a Full Metal Jacket style film about a U.S. Navy trainee that struggles in the face of a vicious, brutal academy, before being deployed to on his first mission. The "difficult training" aspect is actually in the film... for about the first 20 minutes. Then the remainder is actually about a boxing tournament at the academy. Also there are war scenes in the trailer that are not in the actual film.
  • The Apparition has a trailer with more of a plot than the finished film has - implying the evil whatsit will only attack people once they start believing in it, an interesting concept not present in the movie.
  • The trailer for Arachnophobia used lighthearted music and put major focus on John Goodman's role as a quirky exterminator, making it look to be a lighthearted comedy. Turns out that while there are comedic scenes, it's largely a horror film.
  • L'Argent: The trailer consists entirely of shots of men getting money out of ATMs and into their jackets; we see hands but no faces. This suggests the film is about some kind of ATM fraud. The film is in fact an updating of Tolstoy short story about a forged coupon and ATMs are almost irrelevant to the movie's plot. The trailer can be viewed on YouTube; the video has one comment sarcastically stating the trailer has too many spoilers.
  • Argylle: The trailers and posters leads you to believe that Argylle (Henry Cavill) is the main character of the movie. In actuality, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the main character while Argylle only has a few minutes of screen time.
  • Artemis Fowl:
    • The trailer implies Holly Short is working with Artemis of her own free will, possibly as a double agent. She helps him eventually but it begins as a kidnapping.
    • The trailer implies it's Artemis and his father practicing kendo. It's actually Butler and Juliet.
  • The trailer for the Arthur (2011) remake has this pretty bad. The trailer makes it look like Jennifer Garner is playing the Liza Minnelli role and a random actress in one scene is playing the fiancee. In actuality, Jennifer Garner is playing the fiancée and Greta Gerwig (who appears in a grand total of one shot in the trailer) plays the actual love interest.
  • As Good as It Gets looked like it would have had a George Carlin type character using more cynical observations and one liners than the one in the preview. The subplot hijacking the main plot didn't help.
  • The Assistant: The trailer makes the film look like a thriller instead of the extremely minimalist and subtle Day in the Life drama that it is.
  • Wes Anderson's Asteroid City was marketed as a quirky sci-fi comedy. The trailers never bring up the Meta Twist that Asteroid City is a Show Within a Show; to be specific, within the film's fiction, Asteroid City is a play being put on by a company of actors, and the film has the framing device of a TV network doing a behind-the-scenes making-of special of the play.
  • The trailers for August: Osage County depict it as a heartwarming comedy-drama about a family who bicker but love each other deep down. In the actual film, the family genuinely hate each other, and the plot is thoroughly tragic due to the fall-out from their mutual loathing.

    B 
  • Back to the Future:
    • The first film was released at a time where the most successful comedies were raunchy R-rated affairs (e.g. Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds). Thus, many trailers featured the line "You mean my mom has the hots for me?!" to make it seem like such a film with a science fiction element, when the film is much more of a sci-fi comedy for all audiences with that mom thing being a subplot. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale have spoken negatively about this in interviews.
    • With Back to the Future Part II, Zemeckis and Gale were displeased with how it was sold as a standalone film, when it was really the first part of a two-part movie. They blame this for its box-office decline, starting out strong, but quickly going down over time.
    • A trailer for Back to the Future Part III included what appeared to be Marty shooting at Doc Brown, knocking his hat off, which turns out to be two unrelated bits of the film.
  • Bandslam is actually more of an indie coming of age teen dramedy like Juno or Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, not the spiritual sequel to the High School Musical franchise the trailers made it out to be. A serious backfire, as the film seriously bombed despite relatively good reviews.
  • In the UK, early TV spots for Beastly tried to make it look like Twilight by making the main character look like a supernatural being instead of a human under a curse.
  • There was one shot of Ridley screaming in what looks like anger in the trailer for Beautiful Creatures (at 1:52, after Lena snarls "I want you outta here!"). Thing is, what actually happens is that Lena tells her to get out, and then Ridley screams in anger that she's so sick of everyone treating Lena like she's special, to which Lena coldly replies "I said, get away from my boyfriend, you witch." Ridley's face changes to surprise and fear, and then she goes flying.
  • The trailers for Beetlejuice make Michael Keaton appear to be the main character, even making him sound like the top-billed star. In reality, the lead characters are played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. While the film is named after Beetlejuice, and the character is a major driving force of the plot, Keaton has only 20 minutes of screen time.
  • In yet another example of a non-comedy starring a comedian marketed as a comedy, there's the 1994 Robin Williams film Being Human (no relation). The trailer made it look like it was going to be another one of those "sweet-but-unlucky Robin" movies, and hey, the premise was the story of the same man through different periods of history, that makes for good comedy. But the movie was really a drama. And it was boring. And now it's more or less forgotten.
  • Be Kind Rewind:
    • The trailer 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 fact that the trailer concentrates solely on the sweding, and not at all on the Fats Waller and community spirit angles, is misleading in and of itself. The trailer makes it appear that the major plotline of the movie is an idiot comedy about Jack Black and Mos Def trying to keep their neighbors from figuring out that the sweded films aren't the originals.
  • The marketing for the Australian-American holiday horror film Better Watch Out makes the film look like a horror-tinged spin on Home Alone where a teenaged babysitter and her charges are tormented by home invaders. And...that's what you get. For the first twenty or so minutes. Then comes the reveal the kids staged the break-in and hold her hostage, with the leader of the two being a violent psycho who actively tries to seduce his captive. The rest of the film is her trying to escape.
  • Bicentennial Man: The trailers suggest this will be another goofy Robin Williams comedy, this one about a household robot. Trailers emphasized the time Andrew spends living with the Martins, but he actually moves out before the film is halfway over and is a drama about Andrew's long-term transformation into a human being. It also emphasized that Chris Columbus was directing, after his success with Mrs. Doubtfire. Even now the movie is often put in the children's, family, and comedy sections, despite its profanity, sex, and being a romantic drama questioning the definitions of humanity.
  • Billion Dollar Brain; the trailer gives the impression the film is a science-fiction movie about an evil computer that attempts to take over the world; in fact it's about an incompetent British ex-MI5 agent (Michael Caine) who stumbles across a Texan oil billionaire's attempt to foment counter-revolution in Latvia; the eponymous computer is used to run his business empire and only appears in one brief scene.
  • The trailer for the 2006 version of Black Christmas was full of interesting scenes, like a girl getting dragged by Christmas lights, or another one being trapped under the ice... scenes shot just for the trailer to make the movie look scarier. The studio went behind the director's back to make those scenes; he was pissed when he found out. The scenes in question can be found here, compiled from all the promotional material.
  • Black Sea is centered around a submarine crew searching for lost Nazi gold in the titular sea. In the trailer, it is mentioned that that whenever someone is killed, their share of the money increases, implying that everyone is out to get one another over greed. In reality, one's killed out of frustration, and all the other deaths are due to on-ship accidents.
  • Black Swan. Nearly every clip in the trailer is used in entirely different context in the film itself.
  • UK trailers for The Blind Side contain nary a hint of a sporting connection. Now that takes some doing.
  • The American trailer for The Boat That Rocked, released in the U.S. under the title Pirate Radio, portrays the film as if Philip Seymour Hoffman's character would be the center of the plot (understandable marketing choice, since Hoffman was the only American actor of the main cast). However, while Hoffman's character is certainly prominent, most members of the main cast are more involved in the plot, though the story of Carl (played by Tom Sturridge) is perhaps given the most attention. The trailer in question can be found here. For contrast, watch a more accurate trailer here.
  • The trailer for the 1945 film The Body Snatcher emphasizes that it stars both famed horror actors Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. While Karloff does have a prominent role, Lugosi has a minor part as a janitor.
  • The trailer for Boogie Nights made it look like a constantly fun, largely dance-oriented romp with lots of sex thrown in for good measure. The film is a very great deal more dark and downbeat than that and there isn't all that much dancing.
  • The Book of Eli is a fairly understated, slow-burn drama about the different attitudes towards faith of two men, with a couple of (extremely brief) skirmishes and a scene of a siege in an old house. The trailer sets it up as an action packed Fallout 3-esque series of blades, blood and exploding trucks, using most of the film's combat footage spliced together.
  • 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 shot down.
  • The trailer for Bowfinger completely omits the main premise of the movie: that Eddie Murphy's character, action superstar Kit Ramsey, doesn't know that Bowfinger's film crew are secretly filming him so he can "star" in their no-budget science fiction movie. Instead the trailer focuses almost entirely on the goofier moments with Eddie Murphy's other character Jiff, possibly trying to capitalise on the popularity of Murphy's movie The Nutty Professor (1996).
  • A TV spot on the Sci-Fi Channel for Brazil consisted entirely of scenes from Sam's dream sequences, without any hint of the Orwellian future the movie actually takes place in.
  • The trailer for Bridesmaids makes it look like a typical raunchy comedy with the same two jokes used over and over: Kristen Wiig is single and Kristen Wiig is an alcoholic. The actual film is much deeper and quite depressing at times but still manages to be funny (there is also more of a variety in humor).
  • Fans of the book will know Bridge to Terabithia is not a fantasy adventure story, as depicted in the trailers for the movie, but more of a tale about bonding between two friends who create an imaginary fantasy to cope with their troubles. The screenwriters have stated that they are not pleased with the way the film was marketed, and the actual movie proved to be much more faithful to the book.
  • The trailers for Brightburn made it look like Brandon Breyer's fall into darkness was in part due to bullying and teachers being apathetic about it, with an example being him pushed around during gym class. In the film itself, it's clear that he was always disturbed. As for that gym scene, he was actually engaged in a trust fall exercise and the girl who called him "a creep" actually called him "a pervert" in the film and was well within reason to call him such.
  • Despite winning widespread critical acclaim including a perfect "4" from reviewer Roger Ebert and still having a 70+ Rotten Tomatoes score, Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead is one of history's biggest ever movie bombs, with a net loss of over $32 million. It was felt that its marketing portrayed it too much as a Sixth Sense-style supernatural I-see-dead-people plot, which it very much wasn't (the marketing clearly missed the point). It's probably one of the most critically acclaimed movies ever to reach the other wiki's "List of biggest box office bombs".
  • The trailer for Bronco Billy made it look like a pure comedy, adding silly music and cartoon sound effects, as did the rest of the marketing. But the IMDB doesn't list it as a comedy, and they're right. With Clint Eastwood starring and directing, it's so much more serious than it looks.
  • All the trailers Bruce Almighty make it out to be non-stop Godly antics, leaving out the part where about half an hour after Bruce gets his powers, the film becomes a soppy love story.
  • The film adaptation of the play Bug is a psychological thriller about a woman getting a new boyfriend and going insane. Yet, it was advertised as a horror film about bugs underneath your skin... and the film suffered because of it.
  • The marketing for Bunny and the Bull made it look like a zany Road Trip Plot comedy, and a pretty weak spin-off of The Mighty Boosh to boot (every single trailer and advertisement reminded us not-so-subtly that it was by the director of the Boosh, and featured the shows' lead actors, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt). This probably made BATB more successful in the UK than it would otherwise have been, as the Mighty Boosh has a dedicated enough following to give anything associated with it a sizable popularity boost. But it was still hugely misrepresented by its advertising, and was far more dark, gritty and sombre in tone and content than the Boosh had ever been. There were humorous moments, but to call it a comedy would be wildly inaccurate. Barratt and Fielding are not major characters (as the adverts seemed to suggest) and have only relatively small cameos. While it's generally considered a good film on its own merits, some of those who went into it expecting "Mighty Boosh: The Movie" were sorely disappointed.
  • The trailers for Buried depicted the film as being a Saw-esque thrill ride. It's really more of an arthouse-type thriller in the vein of Hitchcock's Rope with Ryan Reynolds being the only actor onscreen. Not surprisingly, there were many walkouts at showings from people being fooled by the marketing and the film never went past limited release.
    • One scene in the trailer shows Reynolds realising that a person on the phone knows his name despite his not having given it. The trailer frames it as a shocking revelation (the sort you wouldn't want spoiled by a trailer, frankly). In the film it turns out there's a wholly mundane explanation, which is provided almost immediately.
  • You would be absolutely forgiven if you assumed, from the ads, that Burn After Reading was a wacky comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney. That's not to say it isn't, but it is far darker in tone than the trailers would have you believe.
  • Bye Bye Love, while it still qualifies as a romantic comedy, is much darker and more thoughtful than its trailer would imply, although this is partly a matter of dramatic pacing.

    C 
  • The Cabin in the Woods: It's a Deconstructive Parody of horror films. It's advertised as a straight horror film. Ironically, this is one of the few films where it could be argued that this is exactly the mindset the viewer should have before watching the film.
  • The Cable Guy: Even though the trailers made it clear that Jim Carrey would be the villain, it still looked like one of his usual slapstick comedic roles (this was 1996, before his career diversified). It's actually a Black Comedy verging on psychological horror. Maybe.
  • Neil Simon's California Suite combines comedy and drama as it tracks several sets of characters, one of which is a couple whose marriage is going down in flames. The film was advertised as a straight comedy, focusing on the funnier storylines with none of the anguish even mentioned.
  • The trailer for The Campaign, as with most trailers for R-rated comedies, tones down the language a little and has some instances of Curse Cut Short and other creative editing, including the line "I let the goat lick my wiener", which in the film itself is "I let the goat lick my penis". The biggest difference is a scene where Marty shoots Cam in the leg on a hunting excursion. In the trailer, it's with a crossbow but in the film, it's with an actual hunting rifle.
  • Case 39's trailer essentially gives the plot to a completely different movie: it insinuates that the young girl protagonist is stalked by a demonic force when in reality she IS the demonic force, and several scenes in the trailer are, like many examples before it, not in the film or there in a completely different context. There's one which states that the church has investigated 38 cases of supernatural activity, and this is the 39th... no church plays any part in the film, and it's called that because it's a social worker's 39th case. It's so overt that Phelous even comments on it in his review of it.
  • The trailer for Casper (1995) showed various scenes featuring Casper's hyperactive uncles, letting on that they were the main antagonists and the plot would be mostly them battling the human protagonists.
  • Casshern is a slow, plodding Deconstruction of the Toku genre and carries a strong message about the pointlessness of violence. The trailer features about 50% of the film's action however, so one might watch it expecting 90 minutes of crazy robot killing.
  • Catfish's trailer is so notoriously misleading it has become fairly famous for it. It markets the film as a mockumentary-style thriller. The actual story is a bit less exciting: The woman met on Facebook is actually a middle-aged woman who has created several false personas on the internet. A bit of a twist, but hardly a Hitchockian thriller as it was promoted.
  • Chairman is a spy movie about sneaking into Mao Zedong's residence to steal a top secret plan. Its tagline is "Gregory Peck turned into a lethal weapon ... to stop the chairman before the chairman stops the world!" Is Mao building a superweapon? Nope. The top secret plan is for a enzyme that can improve grain productions to feed everyone in China.
  • 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.
  • Trailers made Click out to be another low brow Adam Sandler comedy. In actuality, it's a fairly depressing drama about a man being forced to skip through his own life as he grows old and dies.
  • The trailer for Rob Schneider's 2010 movie The Chosen One makes it seem like it is another dumb lowbrow comedy, similar to his earlier works like Deuce Bigalow and The Animal. Instead it is a really slow drama about a man overcoming depression. The trailer grossly misrepresents scenes from the movie, like one where Schneider's character briefly sings karaoke in a bar, with the trailer presenting it as a funny scene, when the actual scene is very slow and completely different to its trailer representation.
  • The trailer for Close Encounters of the Third Kind includes a scene where Air Traffic Control is trying to contact an airliner which has just had a near-miss with a mysterious object, asking them if they want to report a UFO. There's no reply, only a long silence, making the audience think that the airliner has been snatched or even destroyed by the object. In the actual film, the crew eventually do respond: they've been thinking over whether making a UFO report is worth the trouble.
  • 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 (when we want both, we know where to go).
  • Subverted in the trailer for the Will Smith film Collateral Beauty, which made it look like a weeper about a man who'd suffered a loss finding a coping mechanism by writing letters addressed to "Love, Death and Time", only to have the physical personifications of all three concepts begin showing up, helping him through his trauma. The film couldn't be further from this. The only thing the film and trailer have in common is Will Smith, having lost his daughter, writing letters to Love, Death and Time. His employees, fearing that his erratic behavior will cost them their company, plan to have him declared mentally unfit so that they can oust him from the company without losing business. The method they choose accomplish this is to hire actors to play Love, Death and Time, surreptitiously film him speaking with them, then digitally remove the actors so that it will look like he's talking to thin air. However, at the end of the film, the three "actors" turn out to be the personifications of the three concepts, who are helping the co-workers just as much as they were helping Smith's character.
  • The trailer for the 1986 Troma film Combat Shock toted it as being a Rambo-style bloodbath, though the film itself was more of a psychological horror.
    • Troma likes to do this on all of their movies. Mostly because they want to the biggest audience possible but also because Lloyd Kaufman likes to play jokes on the viewers.
  • The trailer for the movie Congo claims that the adventurers will find the missing link between man and ape. No such thing happens.
  • The trailer for the Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan film Cop Out gave the impression that Willis was a gritty longtime cop unwillingly saddled with a goofy new partner, or even that Morgan was not actually a real cop. In fact both characters are veterans and have been working together for a long time, and Morgan's character (though indeed the less gritty of the two) is still definitely a proper detective.
  • The trailers for Copycat make it appear that Daryll Lee Callum (Harry Connick, Jr.) is the Big Bad of the movie and the copycat of the title. In reality, aside from the prologue, Callum spends the entire movie in prison.
  • Courageous features a brief montage of scenes at the end of the trailer following a speech by Adam Mitchell (part of Albany's Sheriff's Department) calling on the men to be strong fathers (the crux of the movie). One of the clips involves another officer, Shane Fuller, hanging with his son. In the actual movie, by the time the speech is made, Shane is in prison for stealing drugs from the evidence room to be sold in exchange for cash.
  • The trailer for The Craft: Legacy suggests the film is going to be a dark supernatural horror/drama story in the same vein as the original film, and that the girls - in particular Lily - may end up misusing their powers and/or getting in over their heads. The film itself is very light on horror, to the point it's more of a high school dramedy blended with fantasy. None of the girls are presented as doing anything dark or immoral with their powers either; Lily is called out for casting a love spell on Timmy, who subsequently commits suicide, but she never becomes a truly dark person and it's revealed his death is unrelated to her spell.
  • The entire marketing campagin for Crimson Peak positions the film as a horror movie. While there are a few horror-style scares sprinkled throughout, the movie's actually a gothic romance period drama that happens to have ghosts in it - ghosts who are not the villains and in fact do nothing of importance to the plot aside from pointing to a room for the lead to investigate and providing one distraction.
  • The trailer for Cry_Wolf is almost entirely comprised of footage that isn't in the film itself, in an apparent attempt to market it as a PG-13 slasher film. The mild rating is actually justified in the film itself, as it's more murder mystery than slasher and one of the biggest questions is whether or not anyone has been killed at all.
  • The trailers and TV spots for The Cursed tended to focus on a sapient, corpse-like scarecrow. While it is a part of the plot, said scarecrow is actually only alive for a Nightmare Sequence or two. The real threats are werewolves.
  • The trailer for Cyrus makes it seem like much more of a laugh out loud comedy than it really is. The actual movie, while not devoid of humour, is more of a low key, downbeat drama about lonely damaged people.

    D 
  • The trailer for the Kurt Russell cop thriller Dark Blue does it in a twofold manner. First by making the movie seem like a non-stop urban action movie, while it's a character study of an incredibly dirty Cowboy Cop (Russell) with a deteriorating private life and investigations into his professional conduct who slowly comes to see the error of his ways, and how his lifestyle and those of others like him had a helping hand in shaping the social climate in Los Angeles prior to the 1992 riots. Second by significantly overstating Ving Rhames' role and presenting him as the main antagonist. Funny enough, the poster gives a much better indication of the film's content.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy:
    • A television commercial for Batman Begins attempted to appeal to female audiences by playing Nickelback's "Someday" over shots of Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes looking at each other longingly. Not only did the TV spot spoil one of the climactic scenes of the movie (revealing that Wayne Manor gets torched), but it played up the expectation that the entire film was a love story with a bit of action on the side.
    • Another commercial for Begins (aired prior to showings of the film on ABC Family) played up the same "love story" angle, to the extent that viewers could be forgiven for thinking the film is a romantic drama/comedy (a whip noise is heard when Bruce asks if the Tumbler comes in black), where Bruce and Rachel reunite after many years. While it does play a part in the plot, it's nowhere near the most prominent story thread. Additionally, the trailer states that Bruce "fights for family", which is... very unrepresentative of the character's origin.
    • While not terribly misleading, one trailer for The Dark Knight makes it look as though The Joker causes a truck to flip just by firing a machine gun. The two moments happen during the same scene, but the one of the Joker shooting with the submachine gun happens after the truck flips over, and he's firing at cars on the street.
    • Editing also made some parts of the Joker's dialogue misleading — in the actual movie his line "It's all part of the plan" is part of his monologue about how people like order (while he never has a plan) and the part where he says "And here... we... go" followed by an exploding building was from the scene where he's EXPECTING an explosion and is disappointed.
    • The Dark Knight Rises is another big-timer:
      • The dramatic exchange between Bruce and Alfred regarding the latter swearing to protect Bruce and failing does not come up in the actual scene. Alfred utters similar lines, though, at the film's finale.
      • The trailers make it appear that Selina Kyle and Bane are close allies, but in reality she's more or less blackmailed and intimidated into giving him occasional help.
      • One trailer has Selina's line "You don't owe these people any more. You've given them everything!", which she says when she is mounting the Batpod. You'd be forgiven for thinking Selina utters the line in defiance. In fact, she is pleading desperately for Batman to not potentially risk himself in vain. That said, Batman's line "Not everything... not yet" carries the exact same meaning in both the trailers and the final product in that he knows the people still need a true legend.
      • In an example of Never Trust a Leak, one of Selina's lines, when leaked out of context, made fans assume that she'd be allied with Bane. In reality, she says the line to deceive the actual flunkies of Bane.
      • Hines Ward, when outrunning the imploding field, doesn't drop his football in shock in the final film.
      • In one trailer, Bane says "Let the games begin" when he's about to fight Batman. In the final film, he says this when he and his men are about to press the detonators that will blow up the football stadium and the bridges.
      • The shots of the Bat and placement of Selina's and Bruce's banter inside it make it seem as if it's involved only in the climax of the film. It actually debuts very early, when Batman is rescuing Selina from Bane right after the Stock Exchange attack.
      • Bane's "when Gotham is ashes" line is said more slower and has a word or two added to it.
      • One scene from the trailers portrays a Tumbler firing on the final battle between Bane's forces and the GCPD cops. This is a subversion: no such scene actually appears in the movie, although a similar scene appears in the script.
  • Trailers for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows played up its Fish out of Temporal Water humor, which it has plenty of — but rather than a farce, it's a very archly-played drama with Black Comedy relief. The Trailers from Hell commentary discusses this trope and what the film is actually like.
  • The American version of Dark Water was advertised as a jump-a-minute teen shocker very much in the vein of The Ring. They went so far as to market it prominently as "from the author of The Ring", when in reality it was loosely based on a short story by the same person who wrote the book The Ring was loosely based on. The trailer relied on tricks like sped-up footage, scenes not present in the actual film, out of context dialogue, lots of droning sounds and quick-cut editing, and the use of every "jump" in the movie to further the notion it was a straightforward horror flick. While that's (debatably) true of the Japanese original, the American version is actually a slow, atmosphere-focused, dramatic psychological thriller that has far more character development than scares and has more in common with Rosemary's Baby than The Ring. This is sometimes cited as the main reason for the split reviews and the film's box office failure.
  • Television ads for the Day the Earth Stood Still remake have the tagline promise that humanity will heroically "Fight Back!" Really. In reverse, some of the ads imply that humanity is completely and totally doomed, and there is no point trying to fight back, making Klaatu look invincible.
  • All of the trailers for Dazed and Confused depict it as a Stoner Flick. In the actual film, only one character (a supporting character) is actually a stoner and instead the film is a coming of age film about different types of people in different cliques (much of it told from the point of view of a 15 year old).
  • DC Extended Universe:
    • The trailers for Man of Steel adopted a very dark look in order to attract the same viewers of The Dark Knight Trilogy. The trailers also tended to play very somber music and philosophical voiceovers in order to make the film seem very intellectual and quiet. However, the quiet moments showcased in those trailers are perhaps the only ones in the movie, which is in fact actually full of massive city destroying action. Some of the louder scenes were even dubbed over with sad music rather than the actual heroic themes during then.
    • Suicide Squad (2016) somewhat infamously went through at least six different cuts before reaching theaters, which led to some very misleading trailers with a lot of unused footage.
      • Early trailers sold the film as an extremely dark and psychological thriller starring depraved and violent characters, with footage of Jared Leto as the Joker torturing Harley Quinn as a centerpiece. However, after the negative response to the dark tone of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and controversy around Leto's behavior on set, the movie was dramatically recut to be more lighthearted and almost all the Joker scenes were removed.
      • Later trailers were more lighthearted but still represented a very different movie than what was eventually released due to the sheer amount of unused footage.
    • While it was among the Missing Trailer Scenes, the final trailer for Justice League (2017) had a bit where Clark noticed the engagment ring he'd intended to give Lois is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and framed it as a dream a still-grieving Lois was having. In truth, given their clothes, it was clear that it was part of their reunion after the League brings Clark back.
    • Trailers for SHAZAM! (2019) make it seem like a goofy and lighthearted kid's film. Despite its Kid-Appeal Character protagonist, it's actually one of DC's most violent films (and it has more swearing and Flipping the Bird than most as well).
    • Birds of Prey (2020) lied throughout its early marketing, as the trailers highlight Huntress, Black Canary and Renee Montoya alongside Harley Quinn making it seem like the movie would follow them coming together with Harley being the quirky Jack Sparrow-esque lead. In actuality the whole film is about Harley with the titular Birds of Prey being secondary characters who only come together as a team right at the very end during the climax. Warner Brothers eventually changed to title to Birds of Prey: Harley Quinn to be better reflect the actual plot.
    • Zack Snyder's Justice League: The first 2017 trailer for the theatrical version of Justice League had a scene missing in which victor Stone (seemingly before he became Cyborg) walked in an alley wearing his GCU jacket and a yellow banner behind him. In Zack Snyder's 2021 version, it turns out it's all a holographic recreation by Victor/Cyborg in which he talks about how the Nazis found a Mother Box. The banner turned out to be a Nazi swastika, the 2017 trailer suppressed it.
    • The marketing and first trailer for The Suicide Squad fully showcases that Captain Boomerang, Savant, Blackguard, Mongal, Javelin and The Detachable Kid will be part of the main action. They all die in Bloody Hilarious fashion barely 10 minutes into the film, during the opening mission to emphasize Anyone Can Die and that they aren't part of the main story.
      • In the opposite situation to Birds of Prey Harley is frequently shown the trailers making it seem she’s kicking ass alongside the Squad. In the film proper she’s actually separated from the main team for most of the movie having her own Damsel out of Distress adventure and only rejoins the main characters for the climax.
      • Likewise Peter Capaldi’s Thinker is marketed alongside the Squad and is presented as a Poisonous Captive in the trailer, whom the team threaten to kill if he acts up. In the actual film he’s only really present for the third act and soon gets killed by Starro.
  • The trailer for Dead End Drive-In makes it look like a Mad Max knock-off full of car action scenes. In fact, the trailer contains almost all the action in the film (as a result, spoiling the film's ending), when it's actually a much slower-paced social satire that can best be described as a punk cover-version of The Prisoner (1967).
  • Deadpool 2:
    • The second trailer shows Yukio in the montage of X-Force members, indicating she is part of Wade's team. Yukio is actually Negasonic Teenage Warhead's girlfriend and a member of the X-Men, and has nothing to do with X-Force.
    • The trailers also show scenes of Bedlam and Shatterstar fighting enemy forces. They never actually get to do that since they (along with Peter, Zeitgeist and Vanisher) die during the helicopter jump scene.
    • In general, the marketing greatly played up the X-Force aspect and made it seem like assembling the team would be a major part of the film. In reality, the members of X-Force only appear in a handful of scenes before most of them are killed off in the aforementioned helicopter gag, leaving Deadpool and Domino as the only survivors.
  • The trailer for Death Machines has a vaguely sci-fi feel, making the film look almost like a kind of proto-Terminator set in a dystopian future when it's actually a martial arts thriller set in the present day.
  • The Deconstructing Harry trailer made the film out to be about Woody Allen dying and going to a Hell run by Billy Crystal as Satan. The film is about no such thing and the one (1) Hell scene is a fantasy sequence showing you an idea for a novel that Woody's character Harry is describing to other people. Billy Crystal plays Satan in this scene because his actual character in the film is someone Harry hates.
  • Defendor was marketed as a family-friendly comedy in the trailers, but the actual movie dealt with the implications of heroism, drug abuse, and prostitutes.
  • Descendants:
    • The first promo shows a scene in particular where Mal undos Jane's hair; the trailer presents her and messing with her out of spite, but in the actual flick, she reverts Jane's hair to the way it was before she enchanted it, because she's in a bad mood after Jane makes fun of her.
    • All of the promos for 3 build up Hades' role as a villain when he only has three sporadic parts of the film to advance the plot forward, and the actual villain of the movie is Audrey. The character named Celia is also presented as a villain, when she's actually one of the heroes.
  • The trailer for Desperate Measures made Michael Keaton's character out to be, literally, Satan himself. His statements, "I cannot be killed; I am immortal," and, "What are you going to do, shoot me, Frank...?" were taken viciously out of context to this end, with the trailer-makers even going so far as to use an electronic distortion effect to make the latter line sound like it was spoken in a suddenly deep and clearly inhuman voice. In actual fact the Keaton character is just a brilliantly devious human sociopath and the film has absolutely no supernatural angle whatsoever, even in subtext. A second trailer portrayed the film properly as the cat-and-mouse between the cop with a sick son and the criminal he has to keep alive in order to save him (since he's a match for a bone marrow transplant).
  • Devotion (2022): The trailer heavily plays up the air combat scenes and makes it seem much more like a standard gung-ho war movie. The film is actually a rather quiet character drama for the most part, and they don't even go to Korea until over halfway through.
  • Diary of a Mad Black Woman: The entire trailer portrays the antics of a crazy, elderly black woman (Tyler Perry's character Madea) and her typical smartass comments, so the movie's title makes it seem like they're talking about a crazy black woman. Couldn't be farther from the truth; the only way those clips have any plot relevance is that the black woman seen in the trailer has a minor part in the plot. The movie is actually about her granddaughter Helen, who's angry at her husband for cheating on her and throwing her out of the house, and her schemes at getting back at him. In fact, all of Madea's scenes in the trailer were almost all of her scenes in the movie.
  • Die Hard 2: The main trailer plays around with this. Early on it shows a group of soldiers loading their weapons and donning face masks while sinister music plays, implying they're the terrorists trying to take over the airport. They're actually a platoon called in to take the terrorists down and the sequence is when they're preparing to go into combat with them. However, it turns out that they're in league with the terrorists and the "combat" they launch into is completely staged, which means this is actually a case of stealth foreshadowing.
  • The Disappointments Room: The titular room is played up in the film's marketing. However, it barely appears in the movie, and a lot of the movie's events have very little to do with it.
  • Django Unchained's trailers make it out to be an action-heavy Western about two bounty hunters killing their way up to the Big Bad. Just like Inglourious Basterds, however, the film itself is much more slow-moving and suspenseful, with bounty hunting taking a backseat during the second half of the film. It also implies the Brittle Brothers work directly for Candy, the Big Bad, when in reality, they're easily dispatched in Django's first successful bounty and have no relation to Candy - and Candy himself is a dimwitted idiot who's really manipulated by his slave, the real villain.
  • A trailer for The Diary of Anne Frank shown on TCM spun it as an uplifting and happy story. The fact that they were hiding from the Nazis was given only a token nod at the beginning.
  • The Dilemma was advertised as a laugh-out-loud comedy. It does have some hilarious moments, but for the most part, the film is quite dark.
  • The trailer for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels shows the two leads happily walking about town side by side, and then shoving a random lady into the water and stuffing a boy's cotton candy into his face, both acts in the open and for no other reason than their own fun. In the actual film they are both con men who make sure to maintain a good appearance in order to take advantage of their victims, and they're primarily antagonistic towards each other.
  • The trailer for the made for TV film Disaster on the Coastliner shows two trains colliding head on. The collision does not occur in the actual film.
  • The trailer for District 9 implies that the aliens just want to go home, and the humans won't let them. Sure, in the film the aliens are shoved into a slum, but the 'going home' sentiment just isn't there among most of them. Plus, the scene featuring an alien being interrogated isn't in the film and was fabricated for the trailer.
  • Trailers for Donnie Darko made it seem like the film was about an insane, homicidal teenager. Though the film teases the possibility that Donnie is crazy, it's a minor undercurrent.
  • All trailers and marketing campaign made a big deal of showing the audience that Dracula Untold would be about Dracula's Start of Darkness and show his descent into villainy. This never happens in the actual film, and he remains a hero all the way through.
  • The trailers make Drag Me to Hell look like a straight horror film when it is really a horror-comedy in the vein of the Evil Dead movies. The fact that it's directed by Sam Raimi, however, might be a tip-off....
  • One woman felt that this trope warranted a lawsuit when she felt misled by the trailer for Drive (2011) - which, in her opinion, had little to do with driving cars really fast and more to do with anti-Semitism.
  • Duck, You Sucker!, Sergio Leone's last spaghetti Western, was marketed as a lighthearted action/adventure Western set during the Mexican revolution. The film starts off this way, initially centering around a bandit managing to get an Irish explosives expert to help him rob a bank. Then of course the aforementioned bank turns out to be a political prison, and John had tricked him into liberating a bunch of revolutionaries, making him a hero. After that point... let's just say it gets pretty brutal.
    • It's ironic when one considers that some of the more brutal moments are actually shown in the trailers (among them a particularly unnerving scene where hundreds of revolutionaries are forced into ghettos, with soldiers standing on each side shooting them), and they still managed to make it look like it was fairly light-hearted.
  • Dead Man Down trailers made you believe it was a revenge flick of a scarred woman (Noomi Rapace) blackmailing a gangster's (Terrence Howard) number two (Colin Farrell) to help kill him for what happened to her face, while at the same time falling in love before it all goes to hell. In the film, Rapace is firmly a supporting character, and Farrell is trying to get his own revenge on Howard for unrelated reasons.

    E 
  • The trailers for Edge of Tomorrow made it seem like it was a serious drama in the vein of Tom Cruise's previous sci-fi films, when in actuality it's a very fun film that mostly plays its "Groundhog Day" Loop premise for Black Comedy.
  • The trailer for Elysium heavily implies that Max's exosuit is what gives him the ability to override Elysium's system. It doesn't, but the virus it lets him download from Carlyle's brain does. It also implies some shots of Kruger are actually of Max (such as Kruger's determined walk when he begins the coup and specifically starts gunning for Max), and that Kruger is assisting the hero. The trailer also implied that Max's exosuit can remotely crash a ship, which was just gesture by Kruger (activating sticky homing explosives).
  • The trailer for The Empty Man make it look like a supernatural horror film in the vein of Slender Man. This is mostly in the first half; the rest of the film is a Cosmic Horror Story about thoughtforms.
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had this one particularly bad ad that made it look like some sort of madcap comedy starring Jim Carrey (which is not entirely surprising).
  • The early teaser trailers for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 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 it was a sci-fi horror film. While this was the initial concept, the final product is anything but horror.
  • Thanks to the trailers, sci-fi fans flocked to Event Horizon expecting to see something like Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turned out to be a horrific slasher film that happens to take place on a spaceship.
  • The trailers and ads for Everybody's Fine make it out to be some kind of quirky, funny little indie film that the whole family can enjoy. In reality it was a sad drama.
  • This was actually used effectively for the action thriller Executive Decision which heavily used Steven Seagal as Lieutenant Travis, a bad-ass special forces commander clashing with CIA man David Grant (Kurt Russel). Thus, when Travis dies under five minutes after the start of the mission to retake the plane, it comes as a true shock and nicely shakes expectations up.

    F 
  • The trailer for Face/Off begins with Sean Archer (when he's being played by John Travolta) talking about how he's spent his career following and studying Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage). He concludes with "And now I've finally found a way to track him. I will become him," implying that he willingly takes on his enemy's appearance in order to find him. The film begins with Archer actually capturing Castor and putting him in a coma, and the face switch only happens because the FBI needs vital information from Troy's brother Pollux, and Archer reluctantly takes on the mission because he's the only one who can pass for Troy.
  • The movie Failure to Launch had one trailer that aired on male-centric channels such as Comedy Central, in which the entire trailer consisted of several guys getting attacked by animals in the woods. Anyone who saw only this trailer would never figure out by it that the movie is actually a romantic comedy, and that the forest scene barely takes up five minutes of the movie.
  • The trailer for the original Fame began by introducing the main characters and their motivations, saying "For Lisa, it's the dance." However, the clip shown of "Lisa" is actually another character (Hilary) and Lisa spends most of the film not being a dancer - fairly early on in the story, she is dropped from the dance department and switches her major to drama.
  • The film The Family Stone was advertised as a romantic comedy. It really isn't, being instead a family drama with a rather bittersweet angle. And while there's romance involved, it's not between the characters advertised in the trailer.
  • The Fast and the Furious:
    • Most of the marketing for the first film promoted the car aspect and very little about the heist or the undercover cops. So if you came in expecting a movie about racing, prepare to be disappointed as that whole plot stops after the 30 minute mark.
    • The trailer for Fast & Furious (as in the fourth movie of the franchise) includes a scene of Mia driving. While this does happen, it's a very minor thing and only for about a minute near the end of the movie.
    • The Fate of the Furious:
      • The trailer implies that after Dom's (apparent) Face–Heel Turn, he and Hobbs will have an epic rematch with Hobbs announcing that whether the old Dom is still in there or not, he will take him down, over a scene where an armored Dom deflects bullets with a riot shield, as Hobbs fires a belt fed assault rifle. Not only are these shots from completely different scenes, but the two never directly fight each other in the whole movie and everyone, Hobbs included, immediately forgives Dom when comes back to their side.
      • The trailers seem to imply that whether Dom has really betrayed his team/family for Cypher, and why, are going to be big mysteries in the film. In actuality, it is made clear to the audience that Dom is being extorted into turning on them from the beginning, even if for what is not initially made clear.
    • F9:
      • The trailer shows Roman and Tej approaching the farm where Dominic and Letty are hiding out and Roman making a heart with his hands while saying "We thought you could use some love." In the film, he actually says "We come in peace." which gets a Call-Back later.
      • When Roman and Tej meet with Sean and Twinkie, they're looking at a Fiero with a rocket on the back in disbelief. Cut to the Fiero rocketing down the runway and a shot of Roman and Tej inside screaming in terror. The film has the Fiero rocketing down the runway unoccupied and driven by remote control. The shot of Roman and Tej inside comes from later when they go into space.
  • Trailers for The Favourite only feature Queen Anne being quirky and high-strung, making no reference to the lesbian love triangle that the movie is actually about. There's a very brief shot of Anne and Abigail dancing, with no context whatsoever.
  • The trailer for Fearless depicts an inspirational, life-affirming story of a man learning to live life to the fullest after surviving a catastrophe, complete with scenes of dancing and laughter set to U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name." In reality, the story is much darker in tone, focuses heavily on the grief of the survivors, and the protagonist is definitely not a happy man.
  • A TV spot for Fight Club portrayed it as a romantic comedy.
    • Most ads for Fight Club made it look like an action movie all about fighting (and the name certainly seems to back it up). Many theatergoers likely skipped it because of this, and were probably miffed when they realized it was something they might have liked.
    • Ironically, the author of the book stated in the foreword of a republishing of Fight Club that absolutely nobody noted that the novel was a romance; which in a really twisted way, it is.
  • The trailer for The Fighter makes you think that the film is going to quite similar to Rocky with Mark Wahlberg playing the Rocky character and Christian Bale being the Mickey/Paulie-type of character. Instead, it's a more depressing film where Wahlberg's character being The Woobie and always putting with abuse from his family and trying to ruin anything that makes him happy. The boxing and rags to riches scenes come later but it ends up taking a back seat to the family drama not seen in the trailer.
  • The original Italian trailer for A Fistful of Dollars makes it look like Don Benito Rojo is laughing as he watches the Rojos' minions torture Joe. It's actually Esteban that does so in the film proper, with Don Benito serving more of a "good cop" role in the sequence. As for the clip of Don Benito laughing? It's actually from the scene where the Rojos annihilate the Baxters later on.
  • Some of the trailers for Flight portrayed the movie as a quirky and uplifting drama about a heroic, but misunderstood, airline pilot defending himself against bogus accusations related to the dramatic emergency landing of his plane. In reality, the film is actually a very somber and sad drama about the horrible effects that alcoholism has on a person.
  • The trailer for Float Like A Butterfly focuses on the boxing elements of the story, implying the movie is similar to something like Girlfight. In reality, that aspect is fairly minor in the actual movie.
  • The trailers for Flubber made it just look like a remake of The Absent-Minded Professor, but one where Flubber is a semi-sentient goo that can dance in addition to make things bounce. Yet while it is those things, what we got was a movie that was less about Flubber and more about a fully sapient robot that was apparently created by accident. The trailers give no hint of how important Weebo is to the pot.
  • The trailer for The Forbidden Kingdom omitted the basic premise and main character of the film in order to sell it as a typical wuxia film but with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. It's not.
  • The trailers for The Founder depict it as an optimistic story about the creation of McDonald's, despite it being a rather cynical story about the title character taking the franchise from the McDonald brothers. It could be trying to ride on the coattails of Hidden Figures, an actual feel-good true story.
  • Trailers for The Fountain make it look like an epic fantasy/sci-fi adventure, when in fact it is the tragic story of a man whose wife is dying of cancer. Anything supernatural that occurs is strongly implied to have taken place inside the heads of either the protagonist or his wife. note 
  • One commercial for Four Brothers made it seem like a comedy, with a scene involving the death of a major character being taken out of context and Played for Laughs. The actual film was a very dark, gritty drama about a group of adopted siblings out for revenge against the man who murdered their foster mother, and the aforementioned scene was a tragic turning point in the story.
  • The theatrical trailer to Four Christmases made the film look like a It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-esque race to visit four families in time despite a canceled flight, when the actual premise of the movie is that they have to visit four families because of the canceled flight.
  • Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred. Aside from a brief clip of Fred trick-or-treating and getting eggs dumped on him by Kevin (which was a flashback), Nickelodeon's commercials for it were just made out of Fred's imagination sequences, making it seem like it was a Big Damn Movie about Fred battling vampires. It was actually a cliched plot about Fred thinking his new music teacher is a vampire, thoroughly disappointing 99% of the people who watched it the night it premiered.
  • An infamous Freddy vs. Jason trailer has the Final Girl shouting "Place your bets!" (from a deleted scene, which can be found on the DVD) dubbed over her actual line of "Welcome to my world, bitch!"
  • Friday the 13th
    • The trailer for the first Friday the 13th (1980) film shows several false scares in amongst the actual murders, counting up to 13.
    • The narrator for the trailer for Friday the 13th Part 2 either hadn't seen the first movie and/or couldn't count: "On Friday the 13th, 1980, 12 of her friends were murdered. Why should Friday the 13th 1981 be any different?" (Only seven people, not including Mrs. Voorhees, were killed that night, and the film's subtitle clearly sets it in 1979, while the second is established as being set five years later.) Then the trailer counts on from 14 up to... 23. The narrator's comments also imply that Alice Hardy will be returning as the protagonist again. She's killed off by the debuting Jason in the first five minutes of the film.
  • The 1981 horror-comedy Saturday the 14th was titled and marketed to make it sound like a parody of Friday the 13th, but it's a Monster Mash parody of Hammer Horror tropes.
  • The trailer for From Dusk Till Dawn notably plays up the second half when the vampires show up and makes it seem like the group gets to the bar early on, even though it doesn't happen until midway through the film. Additionally, the trailer makes it look both Gecko brothers and the Fullers team up to protect themselves from the vampires. Richie is actually the first to become bitten and eventually turned almost immediately when the vampires reveal themselves.
  • The trailer for Full Metal Jacket shows a bunch of short clips of battle scenes with a man providing an update on the war, and a few other random scenes of soldiers walking around implying that this is simply another Vietnam War film (and not even a terribly good one at that). If you'd never heard of Stanley Kubrick before seeing his name in the trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a crappy b-movie trying to cash in on the success of Apocalypse Now or Platoon instead of an in-depth character study of how war causes people to gradually lose their humanity
    • The trailers also show nothing but men on the field. The whole first half of the movie involving R. Lee Ermey as a drill instructor turning a group of recruits into marines is completely absent. It's even more ironic when you consider the fact that the half of the film which the trailer ignores ended up being more famous than the later battlefield sequences.
  • TV spots for Judd Apatow's Funny People generally avoid (or at least vaguely hint at) Adam Sandler's fight with leukemia in the first half of the movie, and promotes as the typical feel-good comedy that you'd expect from the director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. It's a lot more serious than what the commercials made it out to be.
    • While trailers for Funny People keep the tone of a dramedy intact, they make the Leslie Mann relationship seem all too perfect for Adam Sandler and make Eric Bana seem like a total douche. This isn't true. They also exaggerate the romantic aspect with Mann's character, who is in about a third of the movie and somewhat downplay the relationship between Sandler and Rogen which makes up the bulk of the film.
    • A far more grievous example from the trailer of Funny People was the implication that Adam Sandler's cancer would only take up the first half hour or so and be a device to set up his "new lease on life" pursuit of Leslie Mann. Instead, his battle with cancer is long enough to constitute a film on its own.
  • The official trailer for Fun Size has a scene where Fuzzy chases Albert and yells "Come over here, you little bastard!". In the actual film, Fuzzy is actually a nice guy and never says that.

    G 
  • The trailer for the 1981 film Game of Death II is another really egregious example. It makes it look like Bruce Lee is the protagonist of the entire movie. In reality Bruce Lee appears only in the beginning of the film in the form of stock footage (he had died well before this movie even started production), and his character dies quickly. The rest of the film has no Bruce Lee whatsoever.
  • The theatrical trailer for Gattaca depicts it as a fast-paced action-thriller by constantly recycling a shot from the single moment of violence in the film, when Jerome punches a policeman while fleeing; it also includes virtually no footage of the film's third star, Jude Law, who is roughly as important to the plot as Ethan Hawke's character. There is no indication that the film is actually a slow, meditative exploration of bioethics and genetic cloning.
  • The trailer for Georgia Rule made the film out to be a fun family comedy about intergenerational bonding. While there are some comedic moments, the movie was mostly a very dark family drama with HEAVY subject matter. Namely, the question of whether or not Lindsay Lohan's character was repeatedly raped by her stepfather between the ages of 12 and 14.
  • Ghostbusters (2016):
    • There was some controversy over the initial trailer, as it made Patty look like a cliche Sassy Black Woman whose only contribution to the team was "street smarts" or some similar stereotype. While Patty does have some Sassy Black Woman traits, they're greatly toned down, and she's actually a much more intelligent character than the trailers made her out to be. The fact that she's a Bookworm with an extensive knowledge of New York's history and architecture is very relevant to the plot, but the trailers failed to highlight this, giving off the aforementioned offensive undertones. Even Melissa McCarthy said she felt the trailer wasn't representative of the actual movie.
    • The first trailer also deliberately mischaracterized the film as a sequel to the original franchise, via text implying that the events that took place 30 years prior are canon with it (in tandem with a shot of the original firehouse). In the film itself, the original actors (with the exception of Harold Ramis) appear as unrelated cameos as different characters, while the firehouse isn't actually used as the team's base until the very end of the film, when they finally get enough money/notoriety to purchase it.
  • Gigli was made out to be a light-hearted rom-com when it's really a very dark comedy.
  • The trailer for GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra implied that Cobra's attack on the Eiffel Tower would happen early in the movie and that the G. I. Joe team would then be formed in response to that attack. In the actual film, the Joe team is fully assembled well before the Eiffel Tower attack, which happens roughly halfway through the movie following a lengthy action scene as the Joe team chases the Cobra operatives through the streets of Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the attack.
  • The producers of Girl, Interrupted did their damndest to make a grim drama about mental illness, sexual abuse, and suicide look like a heart-warming, feel-good story.
  • In something of a repeat of the Bridge to Terabithia situation, The Giver's trailers made it look like a brainless action movie only made to cash in on the success of the likes of The Hunger Games and Divergent. It's actually much closer to the book's story.
  • The 2012 Coming of Age comedy Goats has a scene towards the end with Wendy (Vera Farmiga) doing a primal scream therapy session in front of her son Ellis (Graham Phillips) and on-and-off boyfriend/father-figure Goat Man (David Duchovny). There's also a phone call earlier on where Ellis tells Wendy about a girl he's interested in. The way the trailer melds these scenes, however, makes it look so much worse...
  • Godzilla (2014):
    • The teaser trailer is made up entirely of original footage. There's no centipede monster, Las Vegas is shown smashed in broad daylight instead of San Francisco, the train is wrecked in Honolulu, and Godzilla is revealed in a pan-up shot in darkness, not a Face-Revealing Turn in a smoke cloud (though there's a similar shot in Chinatown during the climax). Although this teaser was not meant to be released to the public, some parts did make it into later trailers (like the shot of hundreds of dead people scattered about near a destroyed train), but the multi-legged monster was never supposed to be featured and was explicitly made up for the teaser.
    • The "send us back to the stone age" comment refers to the EMP coming from what used to be the Janjira NPP, not Godzilla - and most of the scenes of destruction are wreaked by the MUTOs, not Godzilla himself. This was meant to hide the fact that there were other monsters (despite it having been revealed in early reports) and that Godzilla is more of a heroic character.
    • Elle does not say "You're scaring me" at any point in the phone call with Ford.
    • Ford Brody's "Can we kill it?" line does not occur with Serizawa present.
    • Almost every trailer focused prominently on Bryan Cranston's character and only showed fleeting glimpses of Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Actually, Johnson is the main human character and Cranston is killed off early on.
  • The trailer for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had a narrator with annoying diction continually blurting out, "The Good... The Bad... and the UGLY" over footage of the three title characters. Unfortunately, because the original Italian title ('Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo') translates literally as 'The Good, The Ugly, The Bad', Angel Eyes and Tuco were swapped in the trailer, making poor Lee Van Cleef appear to be the 'ugly'. Eli Wallach must have been flattered.
  • Good Bye, 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 dark humor in between the genuine drama of the son's Byzantine schemes.
  • 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. The titular "good luck" curse that drives the movie, where any woman he has sex with meets her "true love" soon after, is never mentioned. They did eventually start running commercials that focused on the curse, though.
  • The 2006 movie The Good Shepherd pined the movie as a deep look into the history of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA, including scenes of supposed espionage underway. Really much of the movie is about the personal life of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) his various affairs with women and his struggling marriage. And he just happened to find a secretive agency that spends most of its time trying to decipher a mysterious video. The movie is well over two hours long!
  • Rarely does the leading pig in Gordy actually speak, but the trailer makes it seem like he speaks throughout the movie.
  • This trailer for Gosford Park makes it look like a comedic whodunit rather than a dramatic movie about the British class system.
  • Grandma's Boy (2006) was marketed in the trailer as being about a slacker who lived with his grandma and smokes weed with his stoner friend and pet monkey. Hilarious antics of the trio would presumably ensue. In reality, the film focused on the character's job as a video game tester, which appeared nowhere in the trailer. Stoner antics turn out to be quite limited.
  • Some TV spots for Gran Torino make you think it's about a Grumpy Old Man becoming a vigilante, as aggressive as another Clint Eastwood role. If you don't count "saving" a girl from assaulting gangsters, only in the final minutes he does For Great Justice acts.
  • In the trailer for The Great Muppet Caper, Gonzo exclaims "I think I've got a picture of the thief!" and then we see a photo of Miss Piggy, followed by Lady Holiday exclaiming "Miss Piggy stole my necklace!" This obviously implies that the photo is what gets Piggy Wrongfully Accused. Actually, Piggy is framed when the stolen necklace is planted in her coat pocket, her picture is part of her modeling portfolio that she shows to Lady Holiday in an earlier scene, and Gonzo's picture is of the real thief, Nicky.
  • The trailer for The Green Hornet makes it seem (by splicing unrelated scenes together) that Kato builds the Black Beauty for Britt's father. Britt then supposedly decides to put on a mask and become the Green Hornet to avenge his father's death. In fact, Kato only builds the car after Britt suggests becoming superheroes, and it is made clear that the father dies of a bee sting, until the end when it is revealed he was actually murdered.
  • The trailer for Green Zone implies a Bourne-style thriller, with the government trying to take Matt Damon's character out as part of a cover-up. This is done through changing the context of lines: "I know what you did" is actually a line at the end of the movie and the line "Take that son of a bitch out!" is actually referring to someone else.
  • 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 of the '70s were marketed to Americans in this way.
  • The trailers for the live action adaptation of Gintama portray the film as a high budget historical sci-fi flick set in Edo period Japan, complete with serious narration and dramatic acting. Until the trailer ends and the words "It's a comedy" appear on screen overlaid on decidedly undramatic scenes of chasing beetles and picking noses.

    H 
  • Brett Ratner’s 2014 version of Hercules has taken the Trope to all-new levels (and the article even mentions TV Tropes!)
    • For those not reading the article: The trailers heavily focused on the CGI monster battles, to the point that a few of the internet trailers were nothing but that. In the actual movie these all happen in a montage only lasting a few minutes that all cut before violence really happens. And since it happens at the beginning of the film, a few people walking in late missed what they'd paid to see. The rest of the film is an original tale about what Hercules did after the twelve labors (even though that's already covered by the original myths) that also demythifies the original story. A viewer simply would not have known that that's what they were getting into and people clearly responded with more enthusiasm to the monster battle-filled story than what was actually presented. It makes you wonder if they should have gone to the marketing department before they wrote the script.
  • Halloween:
    • The Halloween: Resurrection trailer made it seem like Laurie was in the house with the teenagers and would turn out to be a main protagonist in the plot. In the actual film, she dies in the first ten minutes or so, due to an out-of-character amount of Idiot Ball. The moment in the trailer when she greets Michael is taken from this sequence, which occurs at a mental asylum and not in the Myers house, and deceptively juxtaposed by the trailer with scenes involving the teenagers.
    • Surprisingly subverted with Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the one Halloween film that doesn't feature Michael Myers. Plot synopses don't even try to make you think Michael Myers is there, and while a mask is featured in the teaser trailer and the poster/video cover, it's not the iconic mask worn by Michael.
  • Hancock is either the saddest comedy ever or not a comedy at all.
    • While it has definite comedic moments, it is not nearly the action comedy that the trailers implied it would be, thanks to the Halfway Plot Switch. The DVD art (giving an additional billing that wasn't there in the theatrical run) and later TV spots blatantly give this away.
  • The trailer for the 1998 Todd Solondz film Happiness makes it look like a quirky romantic comedy. The film is anything BUT.
    • Given how inappropriate the trailer is, it's likely this was intentional.
  • Harakiri: A destitute samurai shows up at a noble clan's mansion, and demands to be allowed to commit harakiri in their courtyard. We then get a lot of talk about the circumstances that led him to this, and how he is more closely connected to the noble house than they think, and finally there is a big action scene. You can probably guess what features in the trailer.
  • Harriet the Spy was advertised as a funny Nickelodeon romp. Then in the second act, it becomes a kid-friendly version of Carrie (and much more faithful to the book in spirit).
  • Harry Potter:
    • The promotion of Chamber of Secrets seemed to really love Dobby, despite him being onscreen for no more than fifteen minutes of a two and a half hour film. Apparently, Warner Bros.' marketing department decided kids love funny CGI characters and almost went so far as to made it look like Dobby would be the new movie's Plucky Comic Relief. Instead, it just made reporters loudly raise the issue of whether or not Dobby was going to be the next Jar Jar Binks.
    • In some TV spots for Chamber, Hagrid's line "there are some wizards, like the Malfoy family, who think they're better than everyone else because they're what people call pure-blood" is shortened to "there are some wizards who think they're better than everyone else," which is then intercut with footage of Harry and Draco at the Dueling Club. This makes it seem like Hagrid was talking about Draco being arrogant in general, with the implication that Harry therefore needs to take him down a peg.
    • The third film's trailer makes Harry's line "I hope he finds me, 'cause when he does I'm gonna be ready!" look like a Badass Boast. The actual scene has Harry go on to say, "When he does, I'm gonna kill him!" and it's actually about Harry slipping into a Revenge Before Reason mindset.
    • The line that "magic will spread from their world into our own" — indicating that the Muggle world would feature prominently in Half-Blood Prince — in fact, Muggles play into only the first five minutes, and then we're back to the Wizarding world.
    • In a minor example, countless TV spots for Deathly Hallows Part 1 took Dobby's line "I like her very much" and used editing to make it look he's talking about Hermione. In the actual movie, the line refers to Luna.
    • Another Deathly Hallows Part 1 example: The movie channel with the rights to air it is showing trailers composed at least eighty percent of material from Part 2 instead.
    • David Thewlis, who plays Lupin in the HP movies, put together a fake trailer for Harry Potter as a teen comedy romance.
  • The trailers for The Hateful Eight painted the film an action-packed and comedic western with quirky characters and snappy dialogue, similar to Quentin Tarantino's previous offering. The movie itself does have some pretty funny moments and a fair amount of action, but in general it's extremely dark and disturbing, more accurately described as a horror movie set in the old west than a true western. The humor showcased in the trailer is really just the comic relief used to break up the soul-crushing tone, not a representation of the movie by any stretch of the imagination.
  • The TV spots for Steven Soderbergh's Haywire depicted it as being like the director's Ocean's Eleven. It is much darker and more action/drama-oriented than that film. This may have been the reason for the film's big Critical Dissonance.
  • This was certainly the case with The Monkees' 1968 film Head. Rather than a movie-length episode of the band's TV series, which the fans would have expected, Head was a strange, surrealistic, absurdist Grand Statement about the band's manufactured image, mass media and rampant consumerism, with subtle anti-war messages scattered throughout. By the same token, it did feature to some degree the Monkees' madcap humor and an assortment of musical selections by the band, and numerous guest stars. An avant-garde, minimalistic, black-and-white, dialogue-free TV commercial showing PR man John Brockman with the word "HEAD" appearing on his forehead in the last few seconds was shown, advertising the movie, with no mention of the Monkees (or the fact it was for a movie) at all. Predictably, the movie bombed, being too surreal for the band's teen demographic, while the presence of the already unfashionable Monkees alienated the counterculture. The movie won a new audience by The '90s after repeated midnight movie showings on cable and its release on video.
  • The trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army implied via context that HB and the BPRD fight a stone giant. In the actual movie, the giant is just a doorway.
  • The trailer for Hereditary imply that Annie is grieving the death of her mother and that her Creepy Child is going to terrify the family somehow. In actuality, Annie is relatively neutral about her mom's death since they had a very strained relationship and her daughter dies about 30 minutes into the movie. SHE is the one that Annie was seen in the trailer grieving for. Most of the rest of the movie is the family dealing with their grief (and culpability in her death) as something supernatural begins to terrorize them.
  • High Fidelity has a scene where the main character is approached at work by his ex-girlfriend's new lover who asks him to let them have a relationship. The main character yells at the guy and attacks him with a jump kick. While this scene does occur, the yelling and jump kick occur in a couple of imagine spots.
  • The trailers for Highlander: Endgame (the fourth Highlander film and the first one to be based on the TV series) featured footage that depicted the main antagonist with supernatural powers and abilities he never uses in the film (opening magic portals, stopping a sword mid-air with telekinesis, making duplicates of himself), making him look more powerful than he actually was; Word of God is these scenes were never intended to make it into the film and were only shot for the trailer. The trailer suggested Connor and Duncan would team up to fight the villain two-on-one, or there would be more scenes where they would fight as a team.
  • The History Boys is primarily about a group of working-class boys trying for Oxford and Cambridge, and their teachers' struggle between different schools of teaching. The trailer treated this as a shiny, happy coming-of-age story. While all this is important, it leaves out a major chunk of the film dealing with homosexuality, which is what most viewers actually take from it.
  • Parodied by one of the trailers for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). The trailer is set up as the in-universe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on movie trailers, detailing tricks that most movie trailers make use of, which do not appear in the actual movie.
    • Often, this section is preceded by the words "In a World…"....[Earth explodes]....but sometimes not.
    • Trailers also normally employ A DEEP VOICE that sounds like a seven foot tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood.
    • The goal is to create a piece of advertising that is original and exciting, yet intelligent and provocative. In other words: lots of things blowing up. [cue montage of explosions from other movies] Occasionally interrupted by a girl in a bikini.
  • The trailers for the movie version of Hitman heavily implied a religious angle that is completely absent from the film itself. The trailer narrator even blatantly lied with a claim that the protagonist was "raised by an exiled brotherhood of the Church" while showing what turns out to be a perfectly normal funeral service in a Russian Orthodox Church.
  • The trailer for Holiday on the Buses makes it seems as if Blakey joins Stan and Jack on the day trip on the SS Platonic, but in the actual film he stays behind at Pontins.
  • The entire ad campaign for Hollywood Homicide had no idea how to sell the film. The U.S. trailer was reasonably close to the tone of the movie, however it focused only on the rap murders and Calden wanting to take acting. Calden's acting is a minor subplot. That trailer had no mention of Gavilan's real estate subplot (a more prominent subplot), the internal affairs investigation or the fact that the main characters had secondary jobs. And just to add insult to injury, alternate takes were used to make the film funnier and much of the last 20 minutes is shown to make it seem action-packed. For the international campaign, the film was sold as a straight action movie (which it REALLY isn't), complete with a trailer that played up the action and sex scenes. The film has relatively little action and only two sex scenes, one of which is Harrison Ford chomping a doughnut mid-coitus... The TV ads for both campaigns didn't help either.
  • Home Sweet Home (2005) has a trailer that sells it as a supernatural horror film. While the movie is a horror movie, the scary parts are severely downplayed, the film itself is more of a drama and there are no supernatural elements anywhere. The "monster" in the trailer, for instance, is a mentally unstable human woman.
  • Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves:
    • The trailer shows Mitch fainting when he sees his shrunken mother on the counter and makes it seem like a comedic Faint in Shock. It's actually a serious situation taken out-of-context: Mitch has chronic potassium deficiency and faints because he hasn't had his medicine, which the shrunken adults have been trying to get to him without success.
    • Earlier, the trailer shows Gordon shouting "You are dead meat, mister!" and makes it look like he's shouting at his son Mitch for joining in the Wild Teen Party and making a mess of the house. It's actually a Papa Wolf moment: he's shouting at a bully who's picking on Mitch.
  • The teaser trailer for Hook has it look like a slasher film, but it's more about the adventures of a now adult Peter Pan.
  • The earliest trailer for Hop featured nothing more than a rabbit playing the drums. There was no indication of the plot, the character's identity, or anything else about the film. The only slight hint came in the form of the title image, the word "hop" inside of an egg shape, which thinly suggested an Easter theme.
  • The trailer for Hotel Artemis made the movie out to be a straight action film with some light cyberpunk elements, in which a mob boss called the Wolf King tries to break into the titular hotel, a secret hospital for criminals, to punish the protagonists for inadvertently stealing some diamonds from him. In fact, while there are some fights, it's a much more somber piece—still with some action, but mostly focused on the main characters' emotional scars, and the Wolf King has at most ten minutes of screen time. He legitimately needs medical care from the hotel, follows all the rules (his line about the hotel being nowhere without rulebreakers, which the trailer plays as a threat, is just a joke), and in all likelihood never even knows the diamonds are missing.
  • The trailer(s) for Hot Fuzz give the impression it's an action movie with lots of guns and explosions. It isn't, as it is a parody of those movies, meaning this could probably count as a subversion.
    • Well, they at least made it clear that the film was heavy on comedy.
    • It is a notable lie in that the trailers make the film look much more lighthearted and zany, with most of it focusing on Nick Frost's antics. In reality, it's an incredibly dark and disturbing black comedy with several moments of Nightmare Fuel.
  • Nick's best line in the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, re: his fetish for The Golden Girls, isn't in the movie.
  • One TV spot for the live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas! movie contained a scene with Cindy Lou Who encountering the Grinch saying, "Santa Claus?" in which the Grinch replies: "I'm certainly not the Grinch, if that's what you're thinking."
  • The trailer for Hudson Hawk makes it more like a fairly standard action-comedy, which does not come close to representing the sheer lunacy of the film overall.
  • The trailer for Hugo depicts it as a family adventure film about the adventures of a young boy and girl in a train station putting together an automaton along with a lot of slapstick as the "evil" Station Inspector tries to catch them and gets thwarted in humourous ways. In reality while it was a family-friendly film with some elements of adventure and some comedy (including a bit of slapstick), it was also a very clever tribute to the beginnings of cinema.
    • The trailers built up the Station Inspector as evil. In actuality, while he is the closest thing in the movie to an antagonist and does cause quite a bit of trouble for Hugo, the film does at least make it clear that he's just doing his job. He even gets a romantic sub-plot and earns his happy ending.
  • Hulk also had a misleading marketing campaign that made it seem like it was going to be a big, loud action extravaganza. Many moviegoers were disappointed to learn that the actual film was mostly a drama about a father and son, which just happened to have a few big action scenes to break up the dramatic bits. This is often cited as one of the reasons for Hulk's financial failure, as audiences who went in expecting a traditional superhero movie in the vein of Spider-Man or X-Men ended up being bored to tears.
  • The Huntsman: Winter's War had a VERY frustrating marketing campaign. The teaser trailer was forthcoming in portraying the movie as a sequel to Snow White & the Huntsman, but then later trailers and TV spots began marketing it as a prequel for some unfathomable reason, with narration saying "Discover the story behind Snow White". The only "prequel" element is the opening prologue that sets up the relevant conflict; the rest of the story is 100% a sequel to the first movie. With confused marketing like this, is it any wonder why the movie bombed?
  • 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, 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.

    I 
  • The Ice Harvest, directed by Harold Ramis, was marketed as a comedy, playing up Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa fame. The movie itself is more of a drama/thriller.
  • The trailers for In Bruges make it sound like a harmless little comedy about fugitives. It really, really isn't. Some trailers for the film refer to it as an action-comedy.
  • The trailers for Inception had the main character claim he wanted to steal an idea, but the movie is actually about him planting one. The final trailer for the movie begins with these lines: "There's something you should know about me. I specialize in a very specific type of security... subconscious security." These lines are a perfect choice to explain the premise of the movie, but they're also an example of this trope because they're a big fat lie, told to the recipient of the implanted idea to get him to cooperate.
    • It also grievously misrepresents the tone of the movie, making it look like a Summer Blockbuster. The actual film is much deeper and more intellectual, action sequences notwithstanding. It is a Chris Nolan film after all.
    • The concept of "inception" is explained in the trailer like this: "We create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their secret. Then you break in and steal it. It's called 'inception'". In the movie, this is actually the concept of "extraction", "inception" is an opposite process.
    • Ariadne's dream where she rolls the city of Paris up like a taco is emphasized in the trailers, but in the movie doesn't affect the plot at all.
  • Warner Bros. published the first eight minutes of In the Heights online... except it isn't actually the first eight minutes. Instead of seguing into the opening number with the Framing Device of Usnavi talking to a group of kids, it takes a scene of Nina at the park saying, "Let me just listen to my block," which actually comes from the scene proceeding "When You're Home." Oddly enough, the short scene of the kids that plays during the opening song is still intact.
  • Trailers for Independence Day depict Will Smith's character saying "Welcome to Earth!" just as he is throwing a punch at an alien. In the actual movie, he says it seconds after punching it.
  • Trailers for The Informant! made you think it was a goofy, satirical comedy about a dumb, bumbling, inept paper-pusher who keeps trying and failing to inform on his company to the government. In reality, it's based on the true story of a very smart but socially-inept man who successfully informs on his company to the government, later admits to embezzling over $9 million (or maybe $11 million), and pathologically lies to everyone. While the film has some laughs, it's not screwball at all beyond what's in the trailer, and the randomly hilarious narrations and mood dissonance over the film becomes Harsher in Hindsight when we learn that the narrations and behavior of Mark Whitacre were a result of bipolar disorder and a scumbag-level of brilliant scheming.
    • In one specific example, the trailer depicts Mark making one of his outlandish comments, then cutting to Agent Shepard uttering a Rapid-Fire "No!". In the film itself, the two shots are unrelated. Mark's comment doesn't raise any notice and Shepard's reacting to a mistake he made while setting up equipment. (Mark corrects this mistake.)
  • The trailer for Inglourious Basterds has a minor example in that it implies a direct confrontation between Brad Pitt's character and Hitler; the more glaring example would be that they paid minimal attention to the "theatre-owner's revenge" plot, instead focusing on the squad's scalp-happy shenanigans.
  • Instinct: The film trailer makes it seem like Powell is akin to Hannibal Lecter or someone similar, an imprisoned sociopathic killer who plays mind games with his doctor. While at first it seems this way, the film later goes in a completely different direction.
  • The International's trailer marketed it as a fast-paced action movie. It's neither fast-paced or an action movie, though there is one notable and very acclaimed action sequence. The final line in the trailer is also grossly taken out of context.
  • The first trailer for Into the Woods took an approach similar to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by hiding the fact it's a musical. Later trailers showed the actors' singing. Interestingly, the trailers emphasize the darker aspects over the comedy, the opposite of how Disney handled the trailers for Frozen and Tangled.
  • The trailer for The Invisible makes it seem like a dead boy is solving his own murder, according to what the other dead guy says. Strangely enough, the other dead guy isn't even in the movie.
  • As William Goldman tells it, this happened to him with Invitation to Happiness. Trailer: A tough boxing match - fifteen to twenty seconds. Something every action fan would love. Movie: Lots and lots of smooching. Twenty-three kisses, he counted 'em. Yes, the boxing bit also was in it - but no more than was in the trailer.
  • The Iron Lady's trailer suggests that the film is about the political career of Margaret Thatcher. The actual film is 1/3 about the political career of Margaret Thatcher and 2/3 about Thatcher as an old lady with crippling mental illness, haunted by the memory of her late husband. Whoever cut together the trailer correctly identified which part audiences ended up enjoying more.
  • It Comes at Night was advertised as a horror film, with the implication that the protagonists were living in fear of creatures of some kind that had destroyed civilization. However, the film proper is a post-apocalyptic drama and the protagonists are actually hiding from a virus that has ravaged the planet, rather than monsters.
  • I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With has a trailer which looks like a standard romantic comedy between Jeff Garlin's and Sarah Silverman's characters. After using him for a one-night stand, she's gone from the movie.
  • I Origins: in the trailer, Michael Pitt's voiceover says "I'd like to tell you the story of the eyes that changed this world." In the film, however, the line is "changed my world." Only one word, but kind of a different meaning!

    J 
  • The posters for Jack are all pictures of a happy guy with little kiddy writing. Quite inappropriate really, for a movie that is about a kid who, at the end of the film, is graduating from high school at apparently 72 years old, and will in all likelihood be dead in a couple years.
  • The trailers depict Jack the Giant Slayer as being a campy family comedy instead of the dark action film that it really is. It's possible Warner Bros. did this to prevent people from accusing the film of copying The Lord of the Rings series.
  • The trailer for the 2011 version of Jane Eyre has two misleading moments for people who haven't read the novel.
    • First of all, after some scenes of Jane's childhood, it shows her as a young woman fleeing across the moors, interspersed with text that reads "She sought refuge," before showing her first meeting with Mr. Rochester. The implication is clearly that she runs away from her Boarding School of Horrors and by chance meets Rochester, who takes her in, when really she leaves Lowood School to go to work for Rochester as his ward Adéle's governess, and the scene of her wandering the moors is from after their aborted wedding.
    • Later, the trailer shows Rochester and Jane's Relationship Upgrade before the introduction of Blanche Ingram, followed by part of Jane's angry Did You Think I Can't Feel? speech to Rochester, and then by her running from the house and Rochester shouting "Jane! Jane!" at the window. The viewer is made to think Jane leaves Rochester because he's been two-timing between her and Blanche. Actually, Rochester only pretends to favor Blanche to make Jane confess her feelings for him, their Relationship Upgrade comes after this and after Jane's Did You Think I Can't Feel? speech, and Jane leaves Rochester because he's revealed to still have a living wife, Mad Woman In The Attic Bertha.
  • The trailers for Jarhead make it out to be a fast-paced, gritty war movie full of explosions and heroics (several scenes in the trailer are not present in the film). This is an egregious example as the entire point of Jarhead is that the platoon never sees direct action, and nobody dies. The most dramatic scene in the movie is a standoff with a handful of nomads... and it ends peacefully. Interestingly enough, the Direct to Video sequel was exactly the type of movie that the trailer made the first film out to be: a fast-paced, gritty war film with plenty of explosions and heroics.
  • This was a big part of the reason why Jennifer's Body bombed. The film was made as a feminist horror-comedy about rape culture and a toxic Pseudo-Romantic Friendship that director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody intended chiefly for young women, but the posters and trailers for it sold a campy sex romp about Megan Fox as a bisexual Alpha Bitch succubus, aiming it at straight young men to the point of alienating the audience it was actually made for. Kusama said that she knew the film was doomed the moment she started speaking to the marketing team: the poster featured Fox in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, and one particularly bad idea that they came up with to promote the film (which Kusama thankfully vetoed) was to have Fox host an amateur porn site. It would be years before the film was rediscovered. Tellingly, more recent DVD covers for the film heavily toned down the fanservice and focused more on both Jennifer and the actual protagonist, Amanda Seyfried's Needy.
  • The third trailer for John Carter made the embarrassing choice of using dubstep and added in a line from Deja Thoris that hinted at a plot element about the risk of both Mars and Earth being destroyed. The film didn't do so well at the box office, so Disney were probably forcing the failure a little too hard.
  • The Judge was promoted as an edge of your seat suspense thriller during the trailer. However, the film is more so a Slice of Life film about a man returning to a small town where he grew up and dealing with unresolved issues with family and a past girlfriend. Many critics were disappointed.
  • One trailer for Jungle 2 Jungle shows Tim Allen and Martin Short's characters Michael and Richard eating something and seemingly enjoying it, then cuts to Mimi-Siku saying "Lizard guts," followed by Michael and Richard doing a Spit Take, seemingly in an I Ate WHAT?! moment. Actually, Mimi doesn't appear in that scene, and what Michael and Richard are eating is caviar offered to them by the villain, which they pretend to like but then stealthily spit out. Mimi serves his father lizard guts in a completely different scene.
  • The trailer for Juno focused on Paulie Bleeker, Michael Cera's character and the father of Juno's baby and barely showed Juno at all. The film itself focused much more on Juno herself, with Bleeker simply featured as a supporting character. This probably came as a result of trying to capitalize on the momentum of Michael Cera, who had a Star-Making Role in Superbad, which opened a few months before Juno.

    K 
  • Kangaroo Jack:
    • The film was marketed with scenes of a wisecracking, talking, rapping kangaroo... who only appears during one of the main character's hallucination. The title kangaroo does not talk, and the film is not as kid-friendly as one would assume from the trailer. The kangaroo in question even complains about this at the end of the film. The dream sequence is, in fact, a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment that was added at the end of production specifically so it could be used in the trailer. The studio was afraid that they had a bomb on their hands, so they made a crass, calculated, last-ditch effort to salvage the film by selling it to the public as a children's movie (which actually worked somewhat, as it managed to do reasonable business at the box-office and a sequel was later made). This spawned a serious case of research failure in amateur film critics, many of whom blasted the film as "another kid movie about talking animals."
    • This was pointed out by Doug Walker in his The Nostalgia Critic review of the film:
    So it's revealed that this nightmare fuel is actually a nightmare, but that won't stop advertisers from putting it in every trailer, making every kid think it's about a rapping kangaroo.
  • If you saw only the Green Band trailers for Kick-Ass, you might be thinking that it's a fun, whimsical Kid Fu-type movie to take the children to see. And here's something else you'd be: Wrong. Seriously, do not let the kiddies see this one; they'll be scarred for life, if not very badly influenced by Hit-Girl. There were complaints about the strong language, sexual references and off-the-charts gruesome violence from clueless parents who brought their children to the movie. You'd think its prominently-displayed "R" rating and having "Ass" right in the title would warrant a little more research into the film before taking the whole family to see it, but moviegoers are a gullible lot. Trailers for Kick-Ass 2, however, were much more clearly indicative of what sort of movie it was.
  • At the end of the first Kill Bill, the Bride takes on the Crazy 88s in a scene which is shown in black and white to avoid an NC-17 rating, and also as a homage to earlier bloodier films shown in black and white for the same reason. The trailer, however, has clips of this scene in color, showing that the B&W was added later.
  • The trailer for Killer Elite depicts the film as a violent action film where Jason Statham and Clive Owen are trying to kill each other to get to Robert De Niro's character (with the tagline "May the best man win"). Though the actual film is still rather violent, it is actually an espionage thriller about a retired hitman having to kill three SAS agents as part of a revenge plot planned by a sheikh. Owen's character is a government agent whose job is to watch him and his associates every move.
  • In the trailer for The King of Staten Island, a brief scene shows Pete Davidson's slacker character Scott in a firehouse doing rookie work (washing the truck, etc.). His late father was a firefighter, and the scene implied that Scott would stop slacking off and follow in his dad's footsteps. No such plotline happens in the movie. In the actual film, Scott's mother kicks him out and his girlfriend refuses to let him crash with her, so he temporarily stays at his dad's old firehouse in exchange for doing oddjobs. It does lead to major character development for Scott, but he never expresses any interest in becoming a firefighter.
  • The trailer for Kingdom of Heaven shows a long clip of a sex scene with Orlando Bloom, no doubt luring some female fans into the cinemas expecting a longer version of the scene. In actual fact, the couple of seconds we see in the trailer are probably even longer than what actually appears in the movie.
  • Kingsman: The Secret Service:
    • Mildly. The trailer makes it seem like "He's as much Kingsman material as any of them" refer to Eggsy, but in the movie Harry is actually talking about the recently-deceased Lancelot. The trailers in general downplay just how balls-to-the-wall the film is and make it look more serious.
    • Big Bad Valentine never says "Humanity is a virus, and I am the cure" in the film itself, though it does sum up his motives. He does say "I guarantee it" and "Do I look like I give a fuck?", but neither of them are in response to being told "millions of people will die."
    • The trailer makes it look like the church melee occurs when Valentine activates the SIM cards around the rest of the world, when it actually occurs much earlier as a test run. It also seems to imply that Harry hasn't been affected by the signal and is just trying to fight off the crazed churchgoers, when in actuality he is affected and winds up causing most of the casualties in the entire brawl. Earlier trailers before the final one even gave the impression that the churchgoers were Valentine's minions rather than a crowd under the effect of a Hate Plague.
  • The King's Man: Trailers played up Grigori Rasputin as the Big Bad, with the plot centering on the proto-Kingsman's efforts to assassinate him. The actual movie features a Legion of Doom of Historical Domain Characters, of which Rasputin is only the Starter Villain, and his subplot ends a third of the way through.
  • In the Nicolas Cage movie Knowing, trailers presented viewers with a question: if you knew when and where a disaster was going to happen, could you stop it? It promised a film about a hero deciding what he was willing to sacrifice in order to save strangers from events only he knew were coming. Instead, it becomes a head against wall moment when the list of dates and locations (and body counts) turned out to be entirely pointless and the movie ends with benevolent aliens loading up humans and animals into space arks to save them from an unavoidable Class 6 apocalypse.
  • The trailer for Kung Fu Hustle faithfully showed lots of action scenes, which was, after all, what the movie was about. It did show those scenes to the song "Ballroom Blitz" and never allowed a line of dialogue to be heard, meaning that not till you've bought your ticket and were in the seat did you find out that the movie is in Chinese.
    • They later dubbed the movie.
  • Kung Pow! Enter the Fist had commercials in which several epic battle scenes were shown. However some of them were just a teaser for the sequel (which has yet to be released, if it ever will) after the end credits and never had any impact on the real movie plot. In reality though they were just deleted scenes.

    L 
  • M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, while marketed as a horror movie, 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 (2004). 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.
  • La La Land has several examples of this:
    • The trailer implies that Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's characters fall in Love at First Sight, showing a clip of them instantly kissing. The clip in question is taken from a dream sequence at the end of the film, after both characters have agreed to end their relationship.
    • The trailer shows what is apparently Sebastian honking his horn outside Mia's apartment, to which her roommate asks if he does that often and she replies in the affirmative. While Sebastian does do the same trick, the context of the first clip is very different in the finished product - he's honking the horn near the Boulder City library so he can find her, after she leaves L.A. in shame when her one-woman play seemingly bombs.
    • The filmmakers also subverted this in a quick shot from the trailer. A clip is shown of Sebastian and Mia walking down an L.A. street at night, hand-in-hand, as they pass a busy jazz club. The scene is in the film... but with Ryan Gosling replaced with Tom Everett Scott, who plays Mia's husband in the epilogue. The scene was reshot to preserve the twist.
  • The teaser for the 2016 Finnish horror movie Lake Bodom's as well as its official synopsis, heavily implied that the movie would be about the 1960 murders that took place at Lake Bodom in Finland. The movie is actually set in 2016, and besides the location any link to the murder case is left up to interpretation.
  • The trailer for the Korean disaster movie The Last Days features a huge tsunami smashing through the city of Pusan and causing untold destruction. Truly, something that wouldn't have looked out of place in 2012. What the trailer doesn't tell you is that, to watch those (very) few minutes of scenery gorn, you'll first have to sit through almost an hour and a half of Korean dramedy of dubious value.
  • The trailer for The Last House On Dead End Street may be made of pure Nightmare Fuel, but it is neither The Exorcist clone it appears to be or even connected to The Last House on the Left at all.
  • The trailers for The Last House on the Left remake make it sound like the parents get their revenge on their daughter's attackers as in the original; they're not (except for Krug at the very end). A case where even the tagline lied!
  • An international example: Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura is a very slow, high-concept, epic-length Italian film about a girl disappears and her friends being so empty inside that they have no remorse and merely get with each other to fill the void that the missing girl left (friend, lover). This is a film so difficult that it was BOOED AT CANNES. If you had only the trailer to go on, you'd boo it too, as the promotional clip makes it appear to be some sort of sexy, breeze romantic comedy, instead of the extensive, meandering ennui you get.
  • 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. Some people thought it was about barnstormers and the name was a reference to flying helmets...
    • As to not alienate anyone who isn't a fan of football, most of the TV ads in the US solely focused on portraying it as a wacky period rom-com. Unfortunately, that meant football fans were not enticed by the romantic angle, the ladies were not enticed by the early-1900s football setting, and the film flopped.
  • Trailers for The Legend of Tarzan made it look like an origin story instead of the Dances with Wolves-type film it actually was, and oddly downplayed the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is in the movie.
  • Les Misérables (2012) had TV spots that didn't let on the film was a musical. The first theatrical teaser trailer suspiciously doesn't use clips of any of the cast singing, apart from "I Dreamed A Dream," and even the later trailer, which features more singing, features a disproportionate amount of spoken dialogue, which only amounts to snippets in the actual movie. As a result, many people not familiar with the stage show didn't realise that the film was sung the whole way through. Anne Hathaway was also given third billing despite having about twenty minutes worth of screen time in the 150 minute epic.
    • To even further this idea, some TV spots featured an unused line of Russell Crowe speaking: "I know you. You're Jean Valjean!" Any one who has seen it knows he practically sings through his part.
    • Honest Trailers must be aware of this, as their "honest" trailer of Les Mis says, "Universal Studios proudly presents the film you realized had absolutely no dialogue whatsoever only after you bought your ticket."
  • The trailer for Lexx's pilot episode, I Worship His Shadow, claimed it was set in the future. It even gave a specific year: 4004 AD.
  • Little Nicky:
    • The trailer made it look like the movie was about Nicky going to live in New York and his brothers coming to ruin his life for no reason. In reality, the movie is actually about the brothers going to New York and Nicky coming to stop them from taking it over.
    • A lot of the commercials, and the tagline of the movie itself, said Nicky is the son of an angel, which is treated as a twist almost 20 minutes before the movie is even over.
  • Trailers for Little Women (2019) made one speech from later in the film look like a triumphant statement on female empowerment, leaving out the last line, "But I'm so lonely!" that changes its meaning entirely. (Or the fact that it's said at the protagonist's Darkest Hour, when she's chosen to marry a man she doesn't love romantically just because she's desperate to be loved.) While the film has a definite feminist message, it's a lot less Anvilicious about it than the trailer would have you believe.
    Jo:' Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it! [Beat] But I'm so lonely.
  • The original teaser to Live Free or Die Hard made Maggie Q's character look like an agent and an ally to John McClane. She's actually The Dragon and only poses as an agent in order to accomplish a task for the film's villain. Additionally, the teaser also presented McClane as being more stoic and grim, when he's actually just as much of a smartass as ever.
  • The trailers for Logan feature Logan out in desert landscapes, suggesting it takes place in an After the End dystopia like the story the film's based on. In the actual movie, civilization is doing okay, and Logan is intentionally avoiding populated areas most of the time, to avoid the Reavers and because Charles Xavier's deteriorating mental condition is causing him to suffer telepathic seizures which could seriously hurt or kill anyone in the immediate area.
  • The trailers for The Lone Ranger made Helena Bonham Carter out to be the female lead. She's only in the film for about 10 minutes.
  • Looper's trailers made it look like an action-packed movie with even the DVD covers showing Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis's characters aiming guns. In the actual film, the action scenes are only a small part of the film, and the far more important scenes with Sara and Cid are barely given any screentime in the trailers. The director and Willis actually approved of this marketing, feeling that it helped keep the other scenes a surprise for audiences.
  • The Lord of the Rings films had trailers like this. One that was during daytime TV that featured only the Aragorn/Arwen romance scenes shown with soft melodies.
    • This was parodied in one of the TBS promos for the trilogy, which intentionally takes scenes out of context to make it look like the film is a love story between Frodo and Sam.
    • Another TBS promo was all about Gandalf on his white horse.
  • The trailer for Lord of War made it out to be more of an action comedy than the super-depressing drama with some Black Comedy it ended up being. And then they flipped it for another of Nicolas Cage's movies, Bangkok Dangerous, which the trailers made look like a slow, thoughtful examination of the assassination trade, when it was actually a pretty standard shoot 'em up action movie. Clearly, the promotional firms for the two movies should have been switched... as it is, they should just be fired.
  • The trailer for The Losers made the film look like the titular group spends the movie fighting back against the CIA, especially with the line "We're declaring war on the Central Intelligence Agency." However, aside from one or two references early in the movie, the main villain has absolutely nothing to do with the government agency.
  • The Love Guru trailer has Don LaFontaine aka (The Movie Trailer Guy) as the voice on the Voiceover Machine. The final movie has Morgan Freeman. This could be due to the fact that this was a movie trailer so why not have LaFontaine used in clever manner. It would make less sense to have him in the final movie.
  • The trailer to Lymelife greatly overemphasized the comedic elements. The film is barely a comedy at all. Furthermore it also made Jill Hennessy's character look like an overprotective bitch. While far from perfect, Hennessy is probably the most sympathetic adult in the entire movie.

    M 
  • Madame Web (2024):
    • A minor example. In the movie's official trailer, Cassandra tells Julia, Mattie and Anya that Ezekiel Sims has some kind of connection to her late mother, and she tries to sum most of it up in a single sentence ("He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died"). In the film itself however, Cassandra never actually says that line.
    • The shots of the four heroines in costume seen in the trailers and posters are just brief future visions meant as a Sequel Hook; none of them actually get costumes or become Spider-Women in the story proper.
  • The Maleficent trailer shows a battle between a human army and the creatures of the moors. What it doesn't show is that this is in the start of the movie and not its climax.
  • Despite all the promotion for both Sophie's pregnancy and the appearance of Cher as Donna's mother in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, both of these only occur near the third act of the movie (meaning there's a bit of overlap with Trailers Always Spoil here). The poster also shows the older Donna with the rest of the cast, even though she died before the events of the film and only has appearances in flashbacks (with most of them depicting her as a young girl, played by Lily James rather than Meryl Streep) and as a spirit at the end.
  • 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 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 and dramatic plot in the film.
  • Marley & Me's trailer screams "See the cute puppy! See the cute puppy get into crazy antics!" The movie itself, however, says "See the cute puppy! See the cute puppy get into crazy antics! See the cute puppy grow old and die!"
  • The dark comedy The Matador was billed as an action movie, which it is not. As a result, the film did very poorly in theaters even though critics generally liked it.
  • The trailer for Max Payne emphasizes the winged beasts and walls of fire Max sees and has lines like "The Devil is building his army. Max Payne is looking for something that God wants to stay hidden." It's like they're trying to make it look like a supernatural movie. People who've actually played the games will know that these are merely hallucinations the protagonist suffers and the plot is actually more of a typical crime drama. It's possible that, due to the Film Noir qualities of the movie, they were afraid of it looking too much like a rip-off of Sin City and tried to take it in a different direction. In fact, when Sin City hit theatres, some fans of the Max Payne games thought the opposite. Apparently, modern audiences are unaware of the noir genre.
  • For whatever reason the trailer for Mean Girls switches Gretchen and Regina's descriptions. In the movie itself Gretchen is described as "knowing everything about everyone", "that's why her hair is so big — it's full of secrets," and Regina is rumored to have two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus. The trailer switches this around, probably to make Regina seem like more of an Alpha Bitch.
    • The upcoming film Mean Girls (2024) is actually an adaptation of the broadway musical. Not that you would know this from watching the trailer, which does not feature a single character singing. This is an incredibly baffling decision, as it gives viewers the impression that the movie is nothing more than a soulless remake of the original with absolutely nothing new to offer.
  • This is practically the M.O. of Seltzer and Friedberg when it comes to marketing. Several times, the trailers for their films prominently advertise scenes that never take place as part of the actual plot. Probably one of the most egregious is in Meet the Spartans where the trailers featured parody scenes of Rambo. These were entirely post-credit scenes with no relation to anything else anywhere in the film.
  • Another backfiring example: Men in Black. An early trailer made it look like an eerie sci-fi FX extravaganza punctuated with mild humor. In truth, humor is its greatest strength. Sadly, later trailers spoiled some of the best humor (as well as committing the common sin of including scenes and dialogue that were absent from the actual film).
  • The first trailer for Men in Black 3 was like this too. Based on the time jump scene (where Manhattan looks a little too clean) and the scene at the HQ (where everything looks futuristic and Agent O replies that K had been dead for over 40 years), one could infer that J and K wound up in a battle with a time traveler who killed K and brought J with him over 40 years into the future, then J discovers he is in the future when O mentions K being dead, and must return to his own time. Based on these assumptions, the line about the secrets of the universe could be interpreted as implying the existence of another organization, even more secret than the Men In Black, who protect time.
  • Mignonnes is a French drama about an eleven-year-old Senegalese immigrant girl who joins a hip-hop dance group, its writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré intending it as a satire and critique of the sexualization of young girls in popular culture. So what happened when Netflix picked it up for American distribution? They gave it the English-language title Cuties (a word that, while a literal translation of "mignonnes", has very different connotations when used to describe young girls, especially in any sort of sexualized context) along with a poster that features the film's tween girl protagonists in stripperiffic dance wear and seductive poses, making it look like a Step Up ripoff with added pedophilia — in other words, exactly what the film is criticizing. The outrage from all quarters was so immediate that Netflix hastily apologized, pulled the marketing material they created, and switched to the original, more modest French poster.
  • A trailer for Minority Report featured Danny Witwer saying 'I have a warrant in my pocket that says murder'. The trailer grafted his use of the word 'murder' onto the end of his in-film line 'I have a warrant in my pocket that says different', which he said early on, in response to Anderton's relatively undramatic insistence that Witwer not be allowed a tour of the precog room.
  • The original trailers for Miracle on 34th Street left out the fact that the film is a Christmas movie centrally about a man who believes himself to be Santa Claus, making it look like a romantic comedy. This was due to the fact that the film released in June, and they feared that making it a holiday film would depress box office. Ironically, the film was successful enough that it ran through Christmas anyway.
  • The trailer for the film adaptation of Mother Night insinuates that the main conflict of the film about an American spy who gave coded tranmissions in propaganda for the Nazis is that Nick Nolte's character is trying to clear his name after the war while the U.S. government refuses to admit he was one of their assets. While there is a bit of this story in the film, the story is about how the main character feels guilt about the hurt he caused as a cover for his espionage, and how he believes that he should be found guilty. When his handler decides to break the rules and admit his role as a spy in order to exonerate him, the main character commits suicide because he feels like he should pay for his actions.
  • The trailer for Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium was downright baffling. All that was shown was a whole lot of beautifully-rendered CGI magic, plus Dustin Hoffman in the middle of it. No indication of the actual plot was ever advertised, which must have created a bit of Mood Whiplash for a few viewers when they learned that the movie is really about Mr. Magorium's magically extended lifetime coming to an end.
  • Mrs. Doubtfire is another Robin Williams film whose trailers will make you think 'zany wacky' and that the Dad he plays is dressing up so as to avoid the results of some harebrained scheme that went wrong. The trailers kind of completely ignore the heart-wrenching scenes wherein he and Sally Field tear each other to emotional pieces as and after their marriage falls apart—in front of their kids. Pierce Brosnan is made to seem an unwanted interloper - in fact he is scads more responsible and stable than Williams' character. And the unmasking scene is not an 'uh-oh' but a huge emotional gamble that at first backfires hideously.
  • Deliberately invoked in this trailer. Looks like your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, right? Actually, it's a Muppet movie.
    Jason Segel: Wait, Wait, Wait Stop! Is this another Muppet Trailer Parody?? Why don't we just show a real trailer? I mean, what are we hiding? Did we make the movie in Swedish or something?"
  • A few examples from the original theatrical trailer and TV spots for The Muppet Christmas Carol:
    • The trailer's opening narration states: "He [Scrooge] was the greediest man alive, until the night he met someone extraordinary..." We then see Kermit saying "Hello," implying that Kermit is the "someone" he meets. Kermit plays Bob Cratchit, who, of course, already works for Scrooge at the beginning of the story.
    • As an irreverent gag at the very end of the trailer, we see Tiny Tim/Robin saying "God bless us, every one!" followed by Miss Piggy/Mrs. Cratchit dismissively saying "Whatever." In the actual movie, Piggy's "Whatever" is from a different part of the scene, and "God bless us..." is the traditional heartwarming moment.
    • One of the TV spots follows a shot of Scrooge, Gonzo and Rizzo flying with the Ghost of Christmas Past with the image of Kermit/Bob Cratchit looking up at a shooting star, implying that he's seeing his boss flying through the sky. That image of Kermit/Bob actually comes earlier, at the end of the song "One More Sleep Till Christmas."
    • The trailer and every TV spot shows Rizzo landing in a barrel of icy water after he and Gonzo fall off Scrooge's window. They're actually two separate scenes (Rizzo does a lot of falling in this movie).
    • Every single ad also features the Russian Dance from The Nutcracker, which is nowhere to be found in the film's actual soundtrack. The theatrical trailer also features music from Beetlejuice.
    • In general, all the ads highlight the Muppets' comedy and downplay how well the film actually captures the darkness and poignancy of the original book.
  • The trailer for My Girl is narrated by Macaulay Culkin's character Thomas J., framing him as the protagonist and the movie as a lighthearted comedy about the Puppy Love he shares with a weird girl. Actually, said weird girl, Vada, is the protagonist while Thomas J. plays a supporting role, and the movie is more serious than the trailer implies, culminating in Thomas J.'s death and Vada having to come to terms with it.
  • The controversial drama Mysterious Skin needed to omit the references to sexual abuse, homosexuality, and extremely heavy cursing to make their trailers suitable for general TV. This naturally put too much emphasis on the "alien abduction" aspect, so it looks like a family-friendly sci-fi movie with dramatic moments here and there. It is not family-friendly. Brian only thinks he got abducted by aliens because he repressed the real memories of getting molested by his Little League baseball coach. While the movie is regarded positively by those who went in expecting a tragedy, people who saw only the trailers may have been surprised after the first twenty minutes.
  • The Mummy (1999) was advertised as a straight-up horror film, instead of the high-spirited Indiana Jones-esque film it was.
  • The American trailer for My Baby Is Black! (French title: Les Lâches vivent d'espoir) makes it look like the white female lead having a black baby is some kind of medical mystery, but in the film itself they show from the start that the baby is black because the father is. The title change was also to make it seem like an Exploitation Film, when it's more of a serious drama.
  • The trailer for Moon makes it look like a psychological thriller, with the protagonist slowly losing his mind from three years of being isolated on the far side of the moon. The actual movie is about clones.

    N 
  • National Treasure featured a very overwrought use of the line 'Do you trust me?' followed by the typical 'yes', and then one hand lets go of the other. This scene means bugger all in the movie. The drop is less than a foot, and the scene takes in all about three seconds, but it made centre stage for the trailer. The rest of the trailer is pretty faithful though.
  • 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.
  • Neighborhood Watch's first trailer made it look like a typical black comedy film with the main characters just being complete idiots and causing disaster everywhere. Which still looks to be the case, but you'd have no idea from the initial one that they're trying to stop an alien invasion the entire time.
    • And despite a name change (to The Watch), the second trailer isn't any better about it. It's like Fox doesn't want anyone to get interested the film. Possibly an Enforced Trope, since the marketing had to be revamped due to the Trayvon Martin case being uncomfortably similar to the movie's premise (about neighborhood watchmen who get a bit overzealous).
  • The trailers for Neighbors make the feud look very one sided with the fraternity depicted as purely malicious bullies terrorising the innocent Radners. In the actual film the feud is much more a Grey-and-Gray Morality one, with Teddy and his friends having several Pet the Dog moments while the Radners stoop pretty low themselves.
  • Hey everybody! It's the latest and greatest comedy, Next Day Air! This hilarious parody (starring Donald Faison) of the life of drug dealers and mailmen will leave you rolling on the floor struggling to catch your breath! Except for the fact that the length of the trailer amounts to maybe half of Donald Faison's screen time, and the main story follows two unlucky criminals who, by luck, acquire some drugs and are pursued by a drug lord who seeks to kill them.
  • The first trailer of Nope features plenty of imagery that either didn't make the cut to the final film (notably the shot of the crab on the miniature furniture is not in the actual movie, nor is anything like it), or was added to keep The Reveal less obvious. It also plays up the Surreal Horror aspect by showing many scenes out of context while explaining nothing about the plot; while the film has many offbeat moments, the plot itself is pretty straightforward.
  • When the film No Reservations (2007) 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 including only a few shots of her tension with the guy as if he were just a minor complication to the whole thing. For the DVD release, the trailers used are for the "all romantic comedy" version, and the other side has been completely omitted.
  • Non-Stop:
    • The trailer makes it look like Hammond is the first victim of the killer, when it is Marks who ends up killing him, and out of self-defense.
    • It also gives the impression that the terrorist is a woman in a red dress, though the hijacker(s) are actually two males.
  • The trailer for Nothing makes it out to be a psychological thriller/horror/sci-fi much in the same vein as Vincenzo Natali's earlier film Cube, when in actuality it is a lighthearted buddy comedy that is almost nothing like that.
  • The trailers for Now You See Me make it look to be that these magicians are using highly advance technology to pull off their crimes, even showing one of them using the "Teleporter". Where in the movie the teleporter is just a prop and it is done by someone in the audience. Though it is clear through the nature of the film this was intentional since everything (such as finding high tech plans) leading up to the teleporter in the first act heavily suggests that the trailer was true.

    O 
  • The trailer for the documentary Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa is filled with ominous music and repeated shots of guns and destruction. In reality, the confrontation depicted is a single subplot out of many and was soon resolved peacefully off-camera. The film is actually a fascinating study of a tiny rural community cut off from the rest of society and the wide range of interesting characters who choose to live there.
  • The trailer for Omen III: The Final Conflict hinted that UK ambassador Damien Thorn was plotting to become the President, even though according to the US constitution he would be ineligible due to being born in England. He makes no such attempt in the film.
  • Outside Providence was not a wacky Farrelly Bros. comedy, despite their pushing the connection (one of them wrote the story, in truth) and showing the funny scenes. In actuality it was more of a coming-of-age dramedy.

    P 
  • Pacific Rim: Del Toro stated that despite sounding exactly like GLaDOS in the trailer, Ellen McLain will sound nothing like her in the final product and was simply done for fun because he is a fan of Portal and wanted people to know she was in the movie. This is subverted by the fact that for the trailer Del toro used Valve's GLaDOS filter, but for the final film he made his own which was toned down but sounds almost identical. Specifically, it's GLaDOS' voice without her catty sociopathy. Except for one little hint of it:
    Would you like to try again?
  • The trailers for Paddington (2014) focused a lot on the bathroom scene and gave the impression that the film would be chock-full of Toilet Humor when the actual film has only one or two fleeting instances of crude humor with the rest of the film being much more in the low-key whimsical spirit of the books.
  • Part of the reason for Pain & Gain's controversy is that the trailers for the film made it appear as if the Sun Gym Gang were pulling off some wacky heist against an unscrupulous crime boss. The movie, however, does not present the protagonists on the whole as even remotely sympathetic, portrays the victims sympathetically and has the Sun Gym Gang do some fairly gruesome things.
  • Pan's Labyrinth was marketed as a family friendly fantasy adventure a la The Chronicles of Narnia. It isn't.note  In addition, the trailers and promotional material kinda left out one detail: The movie's in Spanish with subtitles. This resulted in so many complaints along the lines of "It's in the wrong language! I want it in English!" that movie theaters (and rental stores, once the film hit DVD) had to put up signs saying "Pan's Labyrinth is in Spanish and that's the way it's meant to be".
  • Paranormal Activity:
    • In the final frame of one trailer for Paranormal Activity 2, you can see the family dog in Hunter's room barking at something unseen in the doorway. The crib is empty, however creepily enough in the mirror's reflection you can see baby Hunter standing in it. This never happens in the film.
    • Many of the scenes in the Paranormal Activity 3 trailer were not in the movie, and are likely being saved for the director's cut DVD.
  • The trailer for Party Monster: The Shockumentary featured a prominent clip of one of the club kids talking about the rumors that initially surrounded the disappearance of Angel Melendez, including that his "head was cut off and was in someone's freezer in Brooklyn." Its placement in the trailer makes it seem like this was fact.
  • This trailer for Payback is littered with them, ranging from the minor factual stuff like saying "This is [Porter's] dog" — it's only a dog named after him by a friend/love interest — up to completely misrepresenting the movie as something of a comedy (it's a rather dark Film Noir) and portraying the chillingly ruthless and competent anti hero Porter as a No-Respect Guy and something of a bumbler. And that's putting aside things like featuring scenes that were cut from the film and would only be restored years later in the Director's Cut.
  • The trailers for Piranha 3DD depict it as being your standard horror-comedy, similar to the first film. The final result is actually a parody in the vein of The Wayans Brothers' Scary Movie.
  • The first The Chronicles of Riddick installment, Pitch Black. In order to promote it, Sci-Fi Channel made a 45-minute faux-documentary/drama called Into Pitch Black about an insurance investigator hiring a mercenary to find Riddick and what was left of the ship. Seems like a good way to promo the movie and reveal more backstory. And it might have been, if it'd had any actors from the film, acting and production values better than a 1990s FMV game, or the merest semblance of competent writing. Even the entire genre of the movie is misrepresented: The film is a sci-fi horror thriller in the vein of Alien about people fighting to survive a long-distance journey through a desert in months-long darkness, filled with monsters who can see in the dark. The video instead doesn't even show any of the aliens until the end, and only in quick flashes. Instead, it deliberately re-edits footage to make it seem like some kind of Friday the 13th slasher film, with Riddick stalking the main characters, when in fact, he's actually the "hero" of the film. There's no question they lost more viewers than they gained. If you're really feeling masochistic, have a search for it on YouTube.
    • Though the misrepresentation of the plot is probably the best you can do while avoiding Trailers Always Spoil - knowing that the planet is inhabited by predatory aliens and Riddick ends up as the hero would ruin the tension early on when the audience is meant to assume otherwise.
    • They couldn't have been that wary of revealing Riddick's Sociopathic Hero role, as the DVD contains a never-released version of the trailer with the tagline "Fight evil with evil".
  • The trailer for The Place Beyond the Pines implied that it was a touching story of a troubled young man (Gosling) just trying to do what's right: support his son financially. So, in order for this to happen, he must go around robbing banks. Then, it showed Cooper being the police officer. It implied that he was the cop who was trying to investigate the bank robberies, and catch Gosling's character. Then it showed Ray Liotta, who seemed to be Cooper's boss in the trailer. It also implied that Gosling and Mendes come together as a happy family and she accepted his bank robbing ways and they were to live happily ever after until Gosling was arrested. Not even remotely close to the actual plot.
  • For the Planet of the Apes franchise, the 3rd film of the 2011 reboot series, War for the Planet of the Apes had some pretty deceptive marketing. The trailers made it seem like it was going to be a final all-out war between apes and humans for control of the planet. The actual story that plays out is more like a prison escape film. The "war" between the apes and humans are only a couple brief skirmishes at the beginning and end while the rest of the movie is spent on Caesar and the apes being held prisoner by Colonel McCullough and his army.
  • One of the trailers for Saban's Power Rangers (2017) shows Rita Repulsa hovering over Trini (the Yellow Ranger) while she is laying in bed. Rita taunts Trini by claiming "I've killed Rangers before", implying that there were other Rangers in the past that she attacked. However, in the finalized release, she simply says that she killed the Yellow Ranger before.
  • Precious. The television commercials show only the main character's day-dream sequencing, implying that the film is about an up-and-coming diva, when the actual film is not even close.
  • The trailer for Predators imply that the planet is full of the title monsters, but in fact there were only four in the movie.
    • There is a scene in the trailer where dozens of triple laser sights pop up on Royce. This scene is in the film, but there is only one.
  • The trailer for The Prestige gives the viewer the impression that Christian Bale's character has actual magic powers which he uses for his Stage Magician act. The closest thing to actual wizardry in the movie is Nikola Tesla's machine, used by Hugh Jackman, but given the movie's theme of stage magic and its heavy reliance on misdirecting the audience, the use of this trope is rather appropriate.
  • Notoriously used for the 2007 film Primeval which is loosely based on the true story of man-eating crocodile Gustave. The trailer describes Gustave as a serial killer who has claimed more than 300 victims and remains at large. It completely omits the fact that it's a crocodile. The only mention of his non-human status is a brief line in the trailer where the narrator says "He's real, but he's not human" which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. A crocodile only flashes on screen for about a second.
  • The trailer for Privates on Parade featured footage of John Cleese doing a Silly Walk on a parade ground, making it look like a wacky Pythonesque comedy. In fact, the Silly Walk scene was edited in at the very end of the movie and through most of it, John Cleese is actually fairly restrained and a serious character.
    • Cleese reportedly complained to the producers about this out-of-context use of the shot.
  • 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 Aboriginal uprisings.
  • Hitchcock deliberately misled audiences with the marketing for Psycho, making them think that Janet Leigh was the star. Then her character gets killed halfway through the movie. Only then does the real story (the mystery of the Bates Motel) become evident.
  • The UK network Sky's trailer for The Pursuit of Happyness made it out to be a comedy. It certainly isn't.
  • The trailer for Passengers (2016) implies that Chris Pratt's and Jennifer Lawrence's characters both wake up from stasis on an abandoned spaceship simultaneously, with a major mystery as to why they both woke up. The reality is Pratt's character wakes up due to an electrical failure, develops an obsession with Lawrence's character, and then very purposefully wakes her up for company. None of these plot points are spoilers or twists — they all happen in the first act. This contributed heavily to the film's negative critical response.

    Q 
  • Trailers for Queen of the Damned—and the title itself—imply Akashia to be the central character. It's actually Lestat. Not only does Akashia's total screentime add up to about twenty minutes, her only purpose is to tempt Lestat into being evil.

    R 
  • The trailer for Rachel Getting Married makes the film appear to be a quirky indie comedy a la Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. Sucks for anyone who saw it expecting that and discovering it's actually a very heavy and heartwrenching drama, with many of the humorous scenes in the trailer actually not funny AT ALL in context.
  • One TV spot for Radio Flyer gives the illusion of a lighthearted fantasy about two brothers building a flying machine. They don't give away the fact that they're building it to help the youngest brother escape from their abusive stepfather.
  • The trailer for Racing Stripes added a lot of new dialogue to make it seem like comedy all over, when it wasn't entirely that.
  • Commercials for Ready Player One show a scene where a little girl yells in her room, and then it shows King Kong wrecking stuff in Oasis, giving the implication that the giant ape is the little girl's avatar (a Donkey Kong Junior poster can be seen behind her, strengthening the point). In the actual movie, the little girl is just a random player ragequitting after losing in a shooting game and King Kong is just one of the obstacles of the race trial.
  • Real Steel:
    • The trailer has a scene where Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman)'s son asks Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) what Kenton was like as a boxer, and she describes him as "number 2, top of the line." While she does indeed use that description, in the actual film she uses it to describe a boxer he was fighting against.
    • The trailer makes you believe that, contrary to everyone else, Charlie Kenton is controlling his robot with his own movements giving him better reaction time as well as actual boxing experience and this is seen as something radical against the multitude of remote controls everyone else uses. In the movie, the robot is mostly control by a voice recognition headset, while the "shadow function" only comes into play in three direct instances; it's used (largely unseen) to "train" the robot's fighting moves, for the little boy to dance with the robot for pregame showmanship, and finally like the trailers to actually fight (but even then, only for the very last round). General consensus is the trailer had the better idea.
  • The David Mamet film Redbelt trailers made it look like an action movie that takes place in a Mixed Martial Arts tournament. Let's reiterate: a David Mamet film.
  • Red Dog is misleading, similarly to Marley & Me. The trailer is very light in tone, as is much of the film, but not without considerable Mood Whiplash when Red Dog's owner dies in the middle and Red Dog follows at the end.
  • Red Eye
    • The film is a dramatic thriller named for the fact that it mostly takes place on a red eye 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.
    • 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.
    Trailer captions: (over ridiculously cute Meet Cute) Two strangers... A mutual attraction... A chance encounter... Sometimes fate... Isn't what it seems... FROM WES CRAVEN
  • Red Sparrow had previews that just seemed to be about a "sexpionage" plot revolving around seduction. As put by Brad Jones, it "Trojan Horses the audience into watching an Exploitation Film", given the spy played by Jennifer Lawrence endures Training from Hell full of rape and violence, followed by a main plot with more torture and rape.
  • Reign of Fire advertised with an image of dragons attacking London, with helicopters flying to defend. The real movie wasn't nearly as exciting.
    • Multiple commercials for Reign of Fire ended with Matthew McConaughey's character leaping off a tower straight at the dragon with an ax screaming at the top of his lungs. Just see what happens in the movie.
    • Weirder, the trailer says the film is set in "2087 A.D." when it's actually set in the year 2020. It's unknown, and possibly inexplicable, why this is.
  • 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.
  • The trailer for the 1987 B-Horror movie Return to Horror High (featuring a young George Clooney!) made it look like a like a sequel to a 1982 film called Horror High. It also makes the killer seem supernatural, thanks to showing a cheerleader from behind, who turned around at the last moment to reveal a skull-face (in fairness, the cover of the movie also shows a skeleton-cheerleader). It's actually a standalone film about a high school that was rocked by a series of murders in 1982 and now, several years later, is being visited by a sleazy producer hoping to make a documentary about the killings, only to discover that the killer, who was never caught, is still in the school. No skeleton-cheerleaders anywhere in the film.
  • Rings: Most of the trailers make it seem like the core conflict will be about the protagonist trying to stop the Body Horror Samara is inflicting upon her and avoid her "rebirth" with the help of Vincent D'Onofrio's Blind Character. This is not the case in the actual film. Or rather, the Body Horror happens in the very final scene, the "rebirth" concept is only revealed and addressed in that scene, it happens too fast for anyone to stop it, and Vincent D'Onofrio only shows up at the very end to turn out to be the main villain.
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes depicts Caesar as a scheming villain out to uplift his fellow apes and overthrow humanity. In the films, he's the hero and a pacifist who prefers diplomacy in his dealings with humans. Its sequel would proceed to do the exact same thing.
  • The trailer for the movie Risk portrays it as being an action-thriller, when it's actually just, well, a thriller with one action scene towards the end.
  • The Road. Tons of disaster footage in the beginning that does not appear in the film, which even deliberately avoids showing what caused the apocalypse. A great emphasis on Charlize Theron, who appears only in flashbacks and whose role could only be described as a cameo. And an attempt to sell the film as an action movie, which it is very far from, rather just a very sad and somber look at the dying world and humanity in it.
  • Road House (1989): Due to the success of Dirty Dancing, which also starred Patrick Swayze, a lot of trailers targeted women audiences by playing up its romantic subplot. One wonders how stunned they were when they saw Swayze rip out a guy's throat with his bare hands.
  • The Rules of Attraction. The trailer makes it more like a riotous teen comedy. Those who read the book by Bret Easton Ellis however, knows it's not that.

    S 
  • The trailers for Sabotage (2014) rearranged scenes from the movie to suggest a story often miles away from the actual film's plot, and actually looped in new lines of dialog to perpetuate the fraud. Key example: the cartel's kidnapping of Breacher's family happens before his team's raid on the safe house, not as a result of same. And what we think is Breacher's reaction to the kidnapping ("I'm gonna destroy them") is actually "I'm gonna destroy that bitch," in reference to discovering that Lizzy has killed her husband Monster.
  • In the original teaser trailer for The Santa Clause, the voiceover narration claims that Santa was "out for the rest of the season" after falling off Scott's roof, implying that he was merely injured and that Scott would be a temporary substitute. In the actual movie, Santa is killed by the fall and Scott becomes the new Santa permanently. Although The Santa Clauses eventually reveals that the previous Santa didn't really die.
    • Several TV spots focused entirely on Scott/Santa getting arrested by the cops and the E.L.F.S. rescue squad attempting to break him out, making it seem like it was some sort of family-friendly prison escape movie. It barely takes up 6 minutes of the movie and doesn't happen until near the tail end, and the true plot of Scott coming to accept his transformation is barely glossed over.
  • The Santa Clause 2 trailer featured reindeer speaking proper English, when Comet was the only reindeer who could talk, although he spoke gibberish.
  • The trailer for Saving Mr. Banks accurately promises a movie about Walt Disney making Mary Poppins in the early 1960s. However, it gives undue attention to Disney and Poppins creator Pamela Travers's visit to Disneyland, which is a very brief scene in the movie. It also makes Saving Mr. Banks look like it's exclusively a comedy, barely focusing on Travers's childhood and not bringing up any of the movie's traumatic moments.
  • A number of the trailers and TV spots for Scooby-Doo showed moments from the scene with the Luna Ghost, implying that it was going to be crucial to the film. In actuality, the Luna Ghost only shows up at the beginning of the film for about five to ten minutes. The real supernatural creatures barely show up in any of the trailers, and when they do it's only for a moment.
  • Scream deliberately (and cleverly) played with this convention by putting Drew Barrymore front and center in the advertising. (Barrymore was the most recognizable name in the cast at that time.) But then her character dies in the first scene, in a deliberate nod to Psycho.
  • The trailer for The Secret of NIMH had the tagline, "A fantasy with wizards...and villains...and heroes!" At the line "and heroes", the trailer cuts to a scene with a boy mouse brandishing a stick and declaring, "I'm scared of nothin'!", implying this boy mouse will be one of the heroes. Actually, he's a minor character, just one of several of the children of the real hero of the story, Mrs. Brisby, and does nothing heroic. In that scene, he's just being a bratty kid.
  • The trailer for Secret Window painted the movie as a horror film with the main character haunted by a ghost by emphasizing scenes that were hallucinations. The film is actually a psychological thriller.
  • Trailers for the S Club 7 movie Seeing Double made it look like the band getting arrested was the main plot. In actuality the band are only in prison for about five minutes in the first act. The film's real plot - a mad scientist cloning pop stars over the world - was not mentioned at all.
  • Seven Pounds - the trailers gave only a small part of the plot: Will Smith's character is being The Atoner and helping seven people (drama ensues). The ads also imply this, adding that Smith's character is an IRS agent; his atonement could be monetary. The critics described the film as a romantic comedy and Smith's atonement is donating his organs to seven people (the title refers to his heart, which is going to his love interest).
  • Seven Psychopaths was advertised as a comedic romp where multiple crazy people, including Christopher Walken, go around trying to kill each other, and hilarity ensues. Just to give you a hint of how off that is, Christopher Walken plays a pacifist who doesn't kill anyone in the entire film. The clip from the trailer where he pops out of a coffin and shoots two people is from someone's imagination of how an event would go.
  • The trailer for Shaft and its sequels. The trailers and posters for the first two implied that The Mafia was taking over black neighborhoods, for the first, and that the mafia was trying to control black neighborhoods in the second. In reality, the first movie was about John Shaft rescuing a black gangster's daughter from the mob, even though it was that gangster who started it in the first place. The second was mostly about Gus Mascola and his black minion, and Shaft wasn't involved until Gus was told that Shaft was trying to take over his business in Queens.
  • The Shape of Water's official Italian trailer makes it look like some kind of badass action thriller, implying that most of the film is centered on the heist to bring The Asset out of the facility, and completely removing the romantic angle. It even includes the part where Elisa tells (with sign language) Strickland to fuck off and a scene of the Amphibian Man snarling.
  • Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law was bafflingly mismarketed. The trailers, by taking nearly every line and scene utterly out of context, paint Holmes as a depraved, ineffectual lech, juxtaposed with a squeaky-clean Watson against a backdrop of explosions and scantily clad women. The film itself is a far more faithful depiction of the mood, setting, and characters as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intended them to be portrayed, and probably one of the more faithful screen adaptations of Holmes.
    • On a smaller scale, there's a scene in the trailer of him kissing Irene Adler and later being naked in that incredibly funny chained to the bed scene (the "beneath this pillow lies the key to my release" scene), insinuating that there will be a romance between them. While there's some small romantic tension, she's actually kissing him as he passes out from the drugs she put in the wine. After he's unconscious she strips and handcuffs him, presumably to keep him from chasing her immediately when he wakes up. None of it is consensual on Holmes' side.
    • And to the disappointment of Yaoi Fangirls everywhere, Irene's line "They've been flirting like this for hours" as seen in the trailer does not appear in the film. However, the film was filled to the brim with Ho Yay.
  • The Shortcut at first looks like a happy-go-lucky teenage romantic comedy, but near the end it becomes apparent it's a horror film.
  • Trailers for the Dutch movie Shouf Shouf Habibi overemphasized its comedic aspects, focusing mostly on the failed bank robbery orchestrated by the main character Ap. It's much more of a tragi-comedy about a Moroccan-Dutch family struggling to find a place for themselves.
  • The trailers for Shutter Island latched on to two moments of the movie to make it look like Martin Scorsese had decided to make a supernatural mystery, completely ignoring most everything that happens in the last 85% of the film.
  • The trailers for Sideways made it seem like a slap-stick comedy. Instead it's a dark drama/comedy detailing the depressing antics of two maladjusted friends. Sandra Oh's beating of Thomas Haden Church is actually quite brutal when seen in context.
  • Much to the bafflement of fans, an airing of The Sixth Sense on ABC had an ad campaign making it look like a tragic love story between Dr. Malcom Crowe and his widow Anna. While there is a love story in the film, it's actually a paranormal mystery movie about a doctor trying to help a boy who is traumatized by visitations of troubled spirits, as those of us who have seen the movie already knew. One would wonder the reaction of people who were watching the airing based on the ad's lie.
  • Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. The trailer has many misleading bits, including the implication that the Seal of Metatron causes reality shifts, the careful editing to make Pyramid Head look like a threat (it's not a spoiler to point out he's an ally of the protagonist in this film), and a trailer-exclusive line where Dahlia tells Heather "You were chosen to destroy the demon," which is not the plot of the movie - though the confusion is understandable.
  • Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). Angelina Jolie is in the movie for all of 15 minutes, but you'd think she was the star given her prominence in the advertising.
  • In one of the dumbest marketing moves possible, the trailer for the indie drama Sleepwalking seems like a sugary "heartwarming" family-oriented movie like what is often seen on The Hallmark Channel. Probably not the best marketing strategy for a fairly gritty R-rated movie. Unsurprisingly the movie tanked at the box office.
  • The trailer for Slumdog Millionaire makes it look like a happy love-and-success story, using only the shot of the kid with his girl to the tune of "The Sun Always Shines On TV". It completely fails to touch on how hellish his life is to that point. A poster also advertises the movie as "Two hours of unbelievable happiness!".
  • The trailers for Smile (2022) make the film seem like it will be nothing but a cheesy, made-for-teen, gimmick horror movie like Wish Upon, Countdown or Truth Or Dare that won't take itself even remotely seriously. By contrast, the actual film takes itself very seriously, exploring the struggles of mental illness and how society often pushes those who have it away; Generational Trauma, and despair.
    • It also makes you think it will consist of nothing but constant jumpscares and entirely cheap scares with little to no buildup or atmosphere. While the film itself has plenty of jump scares, they're actually quite spaced out and each one is built up to effectively. Much of the movie's horror actually comes from the incredibly bleak and dreadful atmosphere present throughout.
  • Parodied in Smokin' Aces. The trailer begins by suggesting it would be some sort of sappy romance, then abruptly switches to a frenetic action montage more fitting for a movie about competing assassins. The film itself was much slower paced and dramatic than the trailers suggested.
  • Disney's film Snow Dogs was marketed with scenes of the title animals talking and joking, cartoon style - which occurs only during a Dream Sequence had by Cuba Gooding Jr.'s main character.
  • The Snowman (2017): Between the movie being unfinished (at least 15% of the script couldn't be accommodated in the rushed shooting schedule) and the resultant post-production butchery in an attempt at salvaging what they could, it's surprising that anything from the marketing made it to the finished product, but the most notable casualty is the concept of the killer leaving clues and sending little notes to the police in order to play games with them; only a couple of notes are even sent, and the most prominent one in the marketing, "MISTER POLICE - YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HER - I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES", never appears. They did leave in a scene of Harry finding a pile of envelopes and blank paper in the killer's house, but the weighty import of this is rather hindered by the amount of setup for it that didn't happen.
  • In the trailer for The Social Network, the soundbite of Mark Zuckerberg being read his charges ("You are being accused of intentionally breaching security, violating copyrights, violating individual privacy...") gives the impression that he's being accused of doing all of this by making Facebook. It's actually the Harvard Ad Board referring to Facemash, an unrelated website that he created in college.
  • Of the two trailers that were made for Solaris, one made it look like an action-adventure, the other focused 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.
    • Obviously meant for someone not familiar with Stanisław Lem's original novel.
  • Something Borrowed has a great deal of comic elements in the previews, making it seem like a comedy. In fact, these seem to be the only upbeat parts of the film.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2020):
    • The first trailer shows Sonic causing the EMP blast by running down a remote road too fast. The accident actually happened at a baseball field. Speaking of...
    • The second trailer implies the accident was the result of Sonic running too fast scoring points, being reckless, not caring about any collateral damage he may be causing. In the actual film, however, it's an Angst Nuke, as Sonic's loneliness and frustration from ten years of forced isolation finally boil over. He also reacts to the EMP with immediate horror, and it's implied he didn't even know he could do that.
    • And on that note, the trailer makes it appear that Sonic is enjoying his life on Earth despite being alone. This isn't the case at all: he was forced out of his own home planet to escape capture and hasn't interacted with anyone in ten years, turning him into a depressed loner.
    • The trailers also show Sonic wearing his signature red sneakers throughout, while in the film, he spends most of his screentime wearing worn-out mismatched grey shoes. He wouldn't receive his super sneakers until about two-thirds into the movie.
    • The second trailer also shows Sonic running around the Green Hill Zone-esque island on his homeworld as a teenager. In the film, Sonic was forced to flee from his homeworld as a small child and has not returned since.
    • Some lines from the movie are used in different contexts between the trailer and the movies. For example, Sonic saying "Gotta Go Fast!" isn't said when he's about to start running along the Montana desert highway, but rather after being woken with smelling salts.
    • The trailers played fast and loose with the detail of why Sonic is on Earth. The first trailer and the international version of the second trailer states Sonic came to Earth to save it, but in the actual film the actual reason why Sonic is on Earth is that his adoptive mother Longclaw sent him to Earth a decade ago to protect him from an echidna tribe after his power. The US version of the second trailer was more honest about this, with Sonic talking about how on his world "people were always after my power".
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022):
    • In the first trailer, Sonic and Knuckles's fight at the Wachowski residence is edited such that their Badass Boasting happens during the climax of the fight. In the actual film, they instead drop said boasts at the start with less fanfare. The trailer also makes it look as if Sonic first meets Tails during their fight with the Death Egg Robot, while in the final film, they meet at the end of said Knuckles fight.
    • In the second trailer, Knuckles's meeting with Agent Stone is framed such that Knuckles is breaking Stone's arm as retribution for calling him a space porcupine. In the final film, it's more because every time Knuckles, a Fish out of Water, does a handshake, he grasps it so firmly a Crushing Handshake is inevitable.
  • Sorcerer was marketed as a supernatural thriller since it was produced just after The Exorcist (which shared William Friedkin as director). In fact, it's a non-supernatural action thriller. Even the title is misleading!
  • Practically unavoidable with Southland Tales. Since everything in the film is dependent on context, and that any part of it taken out of context is at best confusing (and at worst incredibly misleading), this is one movie where the people cutting the trailer were in a private hell.
  • The trailer for Southpaw features a scene where the main protagonist's daughter throws a drink on the floor in anger, a scene that never occurs in the film itself.
  • The trailer for Spaced Invaders, while indeed marketing the film for what it was (a silly family action/comedy), featured completely different dialogue from what was in the film.
  • Space Station 76 is a parody of 1970's science fiction. The trailer makes it look like a comedy, but it's a depressing drama with very little humor.
  • During the promotion of a network broadcast of Spanglish, Adam Sandler screams in his typical wacky fashion at super-sexy Spaniard Paz Vega, completely misrepresenting the tone of the film. He's actually the Only Sane Man of the family (really!) and that was his outburst from all the frustration finally boiling over.
  • The Specials: While it does accurately convey the basic plot and tone of the movie, the trailer has a couple of misleading elements. Melissa Joan Hart is prominently featured and listed among the main cast, when she has a one-scene cameo with about five lines of dialogue. Also, it shows a sequence where each of the main characters comes out of the base poised for action, including some special effect shots. While this does happen in the movie, it's not until the very end, and we never actually see any of the superheroes fight any crime in the film itself.
  • Promotional materials for Spencer made it seem like a conventional biopic about Princess Diana. The film itself is more of a historical fiction and has a very tense, foreboding atmosphere more befitting of a Psychological Thriller than your average biopic.
  • Spider-Man 3 had a TV spot/trailer for it made which made it seem like Spidey had the black suit for about half an hour before Venom came in and became the film's major villain. Clips of police officers shooting upwards and Symbiote Spider-Man swinging about were cut together with clips of Peter being smashed through buildings and dodging debris, giving the impression that Venom and Spider-Man would have epic, city-wide battles. Venom is a very minor character, in comparison to New Goblin and Sandman, and even Gwen Stacy has more screen time. He appears only at the very end of the film, and is killed off after a short appearance. The character doesn't survive even one night within the film's universe, and is completely annihilated in an explosion. Here it is.
    • The trailer also made the movie look a lot Darker and Edgier than it really was.
    • One trailer for the movie had Peter asking Mary Jane for help, but in the actual movie, he was asking Harry instead.
    • One trailer for Spider-Man 2 actually used scenes from the movie to make it look like Peter Parker admits he is Spider-Man. He reveals voluntarily to just one person (Dr. Octopus) in the movie.
    • A trailer for the first Spider-Man had a scene never shown in theaters, in which Spidey's web ensnares a helicopter in the space between the Twin Towers. This was cut after 9/11.
    • The trailers for the first movie also show one scene where Spider-Man jumps onto the hood of a car while chasing a criminal. In the trailers he's in full costume, but in the actual movie he's still wearing a makeshift costume at that point.
  • Splice. The trailer promises two hours of a demon homunculus eating people and wreaking havoc. Actual movie? An introspective on bad parenting.
  • There are numerous impressive stunts in the trailer and ads for the Jackie Chan kids film The Spy Next Door. They are indeed in the movie...during the opening credits, as a series of clips to establish Jackie's character's skills. Even more egregiously, the clips were not actually filmed for The Spy Next Door; they were all taken from Jackie Chan's earlier films!
  • Stardust's trailer focuses on the word "ooh" so much that it appears to be something like Witches of Eastwick focusing on middle aged female spellcasters who like to get naked, and the rest of the trailer at least lets you know this is somewhere in the fantasy action genre. It might have driven away its intended audience.
    • It also features a scene where all three of the witches are young when only one of them was in the movie.
  • 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.
    • A real trailer showed what was apparently an early mockup for the special effects of a space scene. In the trailer, the Earth is the "Blue Marble" photo from the Apollo 17. The actual film shows an original global depiction of Earth (or at least a less recognizable stock image).
  • Star Trek:
    • A trailer for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country shows the scene where Kirk gets vaporized. Noooo! It's actually the shapeshifter. This is a particularly egregious example because the shot used in the trailer contains just a frontal close up of Kirk getting killed as he looks stunned. That shot doesn't appear in the film. The actual shot used was shot from behind with both Kirk and the shapeshifter in frame at once.
    • Trailers for Star Trek: Generations give the impression that Kirk and Picard teaming up will comprise the majority of the film, presumably with either Kirk coming aboard the Enterprise-D or both their ships working together. In reality, Picard doesn't meet Kirk until the very end of the film, and their team up consists of a brief land battle against Malcolm McDowell. And Kirk gets a bridge dropped on him.
    • The early trailer for Star Trek: First Contact featured footage from the TNG series, including of the Galaxy-class USS Enterprise-D, presumably because the producers didn't want to reveal the look of the new Enterprise-E at that time. Additionally, the trailers makes Picard's line "The line must be drawn HERE!!!" look like a Badass Boast, when, actually, it's part of Picard's Sanity Slippage. And they played up the prospect of an all-out Federation invasion by the Borg, when, in fact, there's only one ship targeting Earth. We also see a pair of eyes open to reveal the circuitry implanted within them. It's awesome. It's creepy. It's actually Geordi, having upgraded from his old visor to bionic eyes.
    • Data yelling "Resistance is futile!" makes it look like he's undergone a Face–Heel Turn while in the movie itself he yells it as an Ironic Echo at the Borg Queen, as he's revealing that he's never betrayed the Enterprise crew.
    • Star Trek (2009) implied a Kirk/Uhura romance when, in actuality, she's already in a relationship with Spock. Lines are used out of context as well (for example, the splicing of the villain's lines "James T. Kirk was a great man" and "but that was another life!). The scene where Kirk takes the captain's chair looks like a dramatic moment in the trailer, but it's actually Played for Laughs in the film, as the crew are in disbelief that the annoying, brash kid is now in command, since they were unaware that Pike had promoted him moments earlier in case of capture.
    • The trailers for Star Trek Into Darkness, do a very good job of hiding the plot while still showing off a lot of the action. You'd never know from the trailer that the film comes off as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan meets Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. You also get the impression that the Enterprise crashes into the San Francisco Bay, when it's actually the Vengeance with Khan at the helm.
    • The scene in the Into Darkness trailer where a huge ship that's twice the Enterprise's size appears out of nowhere, leading Kirk to turn and despairingly say "I'm sorry" to the crew as he realizes they're completely outmatched? It's not John Harrison's, like the trailer implies. It actually belongs to Admiral Marcus, who's completely cut from the promotional materials - though "Harrison" does later commandeer it.
    • The very first trailer for Star Trek Beyond featured bright colors, a soundtrack by The Beastie Boys, and seemed to be much more action and comedy driven than either of the film's two predecessors, perhaps intending to ride the wave of Guardians of the Galaxy's success. It was received so negatively that co-writer and star Simon Pegg had to come out and assure fans that the trailer was nothing like the completed film, which ended up being much more character driven and truer to the original TV show than the trailer implied.
  • Star Wars:
    • One of the 1977 taglines of the original Star Wars, now known as A New Hope, was "No legendary adventure of the past could be as exciting as this romance of the future." Ironically, Star Wars actually is set in the past: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
      • The original trailer complicates the matter by claiming that "somewhere in space, this could all be happening RIGHT NOW." So, we could be in the past, present, or future.
      • Much of the 1977 advertising implied or outright stated that Luke and Leia get together. Not that you could blame the marketers of the time for not knowing how that would work out. There's a 1977 TV spot included on the DVD, labeled "Forbidden Love", which focuses entirely on this. ("Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. In Danger! In Love! In Star Wars!")
    • Not exactly the fault of the marketing department, but promotional posters and trailers for Return of the Jedi showed Luke's new lightsaber having a blue blade. It was supposed to be blue, but it was determined that the blade wouldn't have stood out against Tatooine's blue sky in the opening sequence, so the color was changed to green. Similarly, the film was initially marketed as "Return of the Jedi", but briefly changed to "Revenge of the Jedi" to give it a darker edge, and several posters that feature the "Revenge" title exist. The title was changed back to "Return" before release due to George Lucas' protest that revenge isn't the Jedi way.
    • Revenge of the Sith:
      • The teaser trailer showed shots of Darth Vader in his iconic costume, and showed what appeared to be various characters reacting to it (R2-D2 beeping wildly, Padme looking nervous, etc.). The trailer made many audiences think that the costumed Vader would have a large role in the movie itself. In fact, Anakin doesn't get armored up as Vader until the last few minutes of the movie; he interacts with none of the other characters except for Palpatine and doesn’t do anything threatening.
      • While the main trailer was known for being a prime example of Trailers Always Spoil, it did omit Anakin's motivations to prevent Padmé dying, making it appear that Anakin's fall to the Dark Side was motivated purely by his own greed and ambition. Most notable are these edited lines, "The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural." "Is it possible to learn this power?" "Not from a Jedi!" and "Learn to know the dark side of the Force and you will achieve a power greater than any Jedi!"
    • The Force Awakens:
      • Scenes of Finn wielding a blue lightsaber are heavily advertised in all of the trailers, heavily implying that he is an up-and-coming Jedi set to follow in Luke's footsteps. It's actually Rey who is groomed to become a Jedi, is shown developing Jedi powers, and has the final battle with Kylo Ren while Finn is never implied to have any Force sensitivity ― only using the lightsaber a few times in a pinch. This makes him shown wielding it the nonverbal equivalent of Exact Words. Meanwhile Rey ― the film's other main character who is far more central to the plot ― was barely in many of the trailers, making the film's entire marketing campaign a total misdirect to purposefully conceal the film's story.
      • The trailers made it look like Chewbacca blows up the bridge of a Star Destroyer using bombs. It's actually a Star Destroyer hangar bay control center, destroyed by Poe and Finn during their escape.
      • The trailers also prominently featured Captain Phasma, implying she was going to be a major villain alongside Ren and Hux, but she has about a minute of screen time and really doesn't do much except look cool.
    • Rogue One:
      • Darth Vader only pops up twice in the film, both effectively cameos where he has little impact on the plot. But every damn trailer after the initial teaser shows Vader at least once, implying a much larger part in the story than he actually had. He even made many of the posters and marketing materials.
      • Rogue One in general has a lot of this, as the trailer has heaps of scenes (Krennic walking across the battlefield of Sakrif, Jyn and Cassisn fleeing from a AT-AT, Jyn facing a Tie-Fighter etc) that were not in the finished film. In addition the trailer has scenes with added dialogue, completely different from what is actually spoken in the film. Saw Gerrera's narration, especially during the bit in the trailer where Jyn turns to the camera in an imperial outfit eerily saying "What will you become?", strongly implies an evil outcome for the heroine... not found in the actual film where she’s just using that uniform as a disguise.
    • The Last Jedi:
      • The editing of the official trailer implies that Rey tells Kylo Ren: "I need someone to show me my place in all this," and he then extends his hand to her. However, fans pretty quickly theorized that the two scenes take place in different locations. Though the context of Kylo extending his hand is fairly similar in the film, Rey says this line to Luke and Kylo is nowhere near to hear it.
      • The trailer includes a shot of Rey running with her lightsaber on Ahch-To (in a scene that was cut) and raising her saber threateningly on Ahch-To (it's a reversed shot: in the film, she lowers it).
    • Trailers for The Rise of Skywalker seemingly showed Rey as a Sith Lord. In the actual film, this is a nightmare sequence brought on by Rey's fears of becoming this.
  • State of Play does a good job of showing the plot of a political murder mystery, but it makes you think the victim was shot and killed by a professional assassin. She was really pushed in front of a train by a professional assassin. Someone else is shot. Both murders are early enough in the movie to not be a spoiler.
  • In the lead-up to the 2019 remake of Storm Boy, some cinemas started showing the trailer for the original 1976 version as if it was a reissue.
  • The trailers for the movie Stranger Than Fiction made it out to be another wacky Will Ferrell comedy, when nearly all the humorous scenes were shown in the trailer. The tone of the movie is actually fairly serious. This isn't to say that it's not funny, but it relies more on smart humor than on the slapstick Ferrell is known for. But the trailer uses music that isn't used in the movie, misrepresents many scenes that are more serious, and if you didn't know beforehand you'd swear that the trailer was hinting at a romance between Eiffel and Krick. And to the extent it is a comedy, Ferrell is the straight man, and it is more the supporting cast—especially Dustin Hoffman—who provide the laughs.
  • The trailers for Struck by Lighting conveniently leave out the fact that the entire movie is told in flashback sequences after the main character is killed by lightning in the first scene.
  • Stuart Little is a criminal offender. Several commercials show Stuart flying a plane or fighting the cat and other cool things, but none of that happens in the film. But it does happen in the ending credits as a montage for what happens after the story is over.
  • Stuart Saves His Family: The trailer makes the movie look like a wacky comedy about Stuart and his dysfunctional family, but it's actually a dramedy. The problems caused by Mr. Smalley's alcoholism are depicted realistically and the film ends with Stuart realizing he can't save his family.
  • Sucker Punch. It is not a lighthearted film at all. Many believe the film bombed precisely because the ads played up the skimpy costumes and goofy violence. Audiences were turned off by what they thought was just another exploitative action flick, when the real film had some Hidden Depths. Well, at least according to some people...
  • Many of the trailers for Sunshine made it appear as a typical "ill-fated excursion" movie in space. Although the film does have elements of that, the trailers didn't advertise a movie that provides a character study of a group of people tasked with sacrificing their lives for the good of mankind.
  • Sunshine Cleaning's trailer makes the film look a bit more light-hearted and comedic than it actually is. It also splices together dialogue from different parts of the film to make it look like they're part of one scene, though this is something even more honest trailers do frequently.
  • Super 8's first teaser trailer makes the film look more like a sci fi horror type movie with a more vicious looking creature than the more family friendly, Spielberg throwback the film ended up being. Later trailers were more honest about the tone of the film.
  • The first trailer for Superman Returns consists entirely of footage of a teenage Clark experimenting with his powers, Martha Kent checking out a mysterious meteor in her back yard, and Lois Lane meeting Superman on a rooftop and looking shocked—all set to Jor-El's narration about why he's sending Kal-El to Earth. This gave a lot of people the impression that the movie was a remake of Superman: The Movie instead of its then-latest sequel. The fact that the title hadn't yet been revealed (the posters and trailer just showed the Superman logo on a blue background) didn't help.
  • The publicity campaign for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street said nothing about it being a musical. The trailer also showed several scenes out of context, changing their meaning. A random trial appears as Sweeney's. A scene in an asylum appears as Sweeney in prison. And eye spying on Joanna appears to spy on Sweeney. And Lovett's line "but what are we going to do about him?", coming after the song "Epiphany" instead appears to come after Sweeney's "At last my arm is complete" line.
  • The film Syriana was marketed as though it were an almost Mad Max-esque thriller set 20 Minutes into the Future, and was full of stuff blowing up. In fact, the film was a ensemble piece on the effects of oil politics on a whole swath of people from divergent backgrounds.

    T 
  • The UK trailer for Tamara Drewe is yet another one that disguises the film as something funnier than it is. At the end of the trailer, two characters are walking past each other, greeting each other, and then calling each other a "twat" or an "asshole". This dialogue is not in the movie; instead they just communicate normally, since it is more of a drama than a comedy. The U.S. trailer featured this clip without dialogue.
  • There is a very misleading trailer for Teenage Mother which depicts the main character as a promiscuous girl who gets pregnant thanks to a gang who "got even with" her. There are four Missing Trailer Scenes — Arlene brushing her hair while wearing only a bra, panties, and boots, her engaging in some Erotic Eating with a chicken wing, her and a boy in a steamy scene culminating with them kissing, and her caressing herself in front of a mirror — all accompanied by erotic voiceover dialogue from her that is never said in the actual film. In short, the trailer completely disregards The Reveal that Arlene was actually not pregnant; it was all an act of Operation: Jealousy regarding her boyfriend Tony and the new teacher Miss Peterson.
  • It was initially believed that Eric Sacks was going to be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)'s incarnation of the Shredder. He's actually The Dragon to the real Shredder.
    • Originally, that was exactly what was going to happen, till people threw a fit and it was changed.
  • Terminator
    • The trailer for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (along with the title itself) implied that the movie would be mainly about the struggle between human underdogs and ascendant machines after Judgment Day—showing among other things a scene of ragtag humans carrying a tattered American flag on a battlefield, which turned out to be part of a rather brief scene of a possible future. The film itself ended as Judgment Day was happening.
    • The trailer for Terminator 2: Judgment Day implied that Arnold would be playing the villain again, as in the first Terminator, and that another member of the Resistance had come back to stop him. (Said 'Resistance member' was actually the T-1000.) Most of this was done by taking scenes out of context, but one shot shows the T-800 sarcastically promising the audience that it will not kill anyone. In-movie, the young John Connor is also in-shot, and it's him that the T-800 is truthfully promising to.
      • This was intentional as to hide that Arnold was the good guy savior from the past, and not the cop Robert Patrick. While the T-800 doesn't kill anyone, up until he actually saves John Conner at the mall it's really up for grabs which is there to save or kill.
    • In a trailer for Terminator Genisys, Sarah calls kid Kyle John.
  • The first trailer for Thomas and the Magic Railroad made it look like a human named P.T. Boomer was the main villain rather than the train Diesel 10, since this was the original idea for the movie. However, just after the trailer was released, Boomer was removed and Diesel 10 became the villain. He only appears in the final movie for a few seconds in actuality, with no major role whatsoever.
    • The trailer also contained a line from Mr. Conductor Jr that was never heard in the final film: "Just hold on, cous!" ( It also wasn't in the original script nor the original version. It is actually unknown where this line came from, but it is likely that it might've been a Throw It In! line that Michael E. Rodgers said during his ADR session.)
    • Any trailer and TV spot of this film had the engines and the human characters share an equal amount of screentime together and mostly showed the Sodor scenes. In reality, while Thomas and the other engines on Sodor have a decent amount of screentime, most of the movie is a Human-Focused Adaptation, thus bumming out many Thomas fans that were only here for the Sodor scenes. Another thing from a few of the TV spots is an audio snippet of James laughing, which sounds like he had a teenage/young man voice, when in the film itself he's voiced by an actress named Susan Roman, who gave him a prepubescent young boy voice, and the laugh snippet isn't used in the film itself.
  • In yet ANOTHER George Clooney example, the trailer for Three Kings presented it as a straightforward action/adventure film. Viewers probably didn't expect torture, murder of civilians, questioning of the USA's role in Iraq, and realistic depiction of gunshot wounds.
  • The trailer for Three Thousand Years of Longing was edited in a surreal, high-energy style. The film itself is much slower paced and has a more reflective tone. Many critics who praised the film cited the misleading trailer as a possible reason why it bombed theatrically.
  • The trailer for the Matthew McConaughey/Kate Beckinsale disaster Tiptoes plays up the notion that the whole film is a quirky comedy about a woman realizing that her boyfriend's family is comprised of dwarves, the wacky misadventures that follow and the couple's realization that she's pregnant. This, coupled with an out-of-character turn by Gary Oldman as the man's wisecracking brother, would lead you to believe that this would be (at the very least) funny. (You would also be forgiven if you thought the film was made in the mid '90s, judging by the trailer. It's not: it was made in 2003.) In actuality, Tiptoes involves Beckinsale's character not only working to further the rights of "the little people," but also deciding to start a relationship with her lover's brother near the end of the film because he has rejected his dwarf child. There are also plot threads that go nowhere (Peter Dinklage, who's seen in the trailer, is given very little screen time, and exists merely to hammer home the fact that dwarves can have relationships with normal-sized people).
  • Compare the original theatrical trailer for Titanic (1997) with the one for its rerelease in 2012. The original trailer, especially in its second half, is practically ashamed to admit that the film is a romance, relegating Jack and Rose's love story almost to a subplot while focusing on the Disaster Movie action. While it worked out well for the film, which wound up as the biggest box-office hit of all time, some (such as Bob Chipman) have speculated that the marketing for the film played a role in the resulting backlash, as young men who'd been promised a new James Cameron action movie instead got a Chick Flick. The rerelease trailer is far more honest, putting Jack and Rose front and center along with the famous Céline Dion theme tune.
  • Ah, Towelhead. Based on the trailer and title, you'd think it's a coming of age comedy about a young Arab girl dealing with racism and restrictive parents while growing up. Actually it's a very Squicky film about a girl's sexual awakening as she goes through puberty, with racism only a mild element. As for being a comedy, any scene in the film that can elicit even a chuckle is in the trailer. And many of them aren't at all funny in context in the actual film.
  • A minor one in the trailer for The Town. Many people falsely took it as an example of Trailers Always Spoil as the trailer presents the events as Rebecca Hall is stressed about being at a bank robbery, hooks up with Ben Affleck and in a plot twist, Ben Affleck is one of the bank robbers. In the film, the audience knows that Ben Affleck is a bank robber from the very beginning. The film is shown from his point of view, not Rebecca Hall's.
  • The Transformers Film Series has plenty of this as well.
    • The original teaser trailers for the first two films made them look far darker in tone than what they actually were, especially the second film, which really was supposed to be the darker installment. It ended up filled with humor and some of the most juvenile comedy available. Needless to say, the first film was much better in this regard.
    • Early trailers for the original film did not feature any dialogue from the Transformers themselves. This made some, including the writers at Cracked.com, believe the robots would be entirely silent.
    • Transformers: Dark of the Moon is an equally bad offender, but for understandable reasons — the trailers and promo material tried to build up Shockwave as the main villain. In reality, he has next to no story importance, and his actions can be summarized with "having a cameo in Chernobyl, then walking down a street in Chicago and getting killed". The true villain is Sentinel Prime, but his Face–Heel Turn being the big plot-twist in the middle of the film, they of course didn't want to spoil this.
    • To a lesser degree, Optimus Prime himself also came off as something of a bad guy with the trailers focusing on him being mad at the humans, slaughtering other robots and delivering the line "We will kill them all!" Actually, he was simply pissed-off, but still a good guy.
    • The trailers of Transformers: Age of Extinction made it seem like a huge fleet of spaceships was heading towards Earth to kill humanity, leading many to complain that it would be just a rehash of the previous film. Actually, those ships only appear in a flashback from the Cretaceous, and something entirely different is threatening the humans with extinction. The Dinobots were also heavily advertised despite only being introduced at the very end of the film.
      • In one trailer, as Grimlock charges towards him, Optimus Prime lets out a battle cry before slamming Grimlock in the face and sending him flying, where Grimlock collides into the river. In the film, Optimus tries reasoning with Grimlock, "We're giving you freedom!" before delivering the big punch, and the 3 other Dinobots (Slug, Strafe and Scorn) are in the background watching Grimlock cringing in pain, as while they were hidden from the trailer.
    • The trailers for Transformers: The Last Knight went out of their way to make it seem Darker and Edgier, with some believing this would be the most somber and serious entry in the franchise to date. In reality, the movie is just as goofy and juvenile as its predecessors.
  • An early trailer for The Truman Show did exactly the same, focusing mainly on the scene where Truman sings to himself in the bathroom mirror. Later trailers focused on Truman's catchphrase of "Good morning! And if I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!" This made it look like The Truman Show would be yet another screwball comedy starring Carrey as another of his goofy characters. In actuality it was straight drama, and the scenes shown mostly happen pretty early in the film, when Carrey's character, an affable everyman, is just joking around with his neighbors.

    U 
  • The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    • The second trailer makes it seem like after Javi learns about Nicolas Cage working with the CIA, he chases Nick with a shotgun, angrily scolding him for lying. In the actual movie, that confrontation takes place before Javi knows about the CIA recruiting Nick, when he takes a break from shotgun practice to incorrectly guess Nick's reason for adding a kidnapped girl into the screenplay they're writing together. Lampshaded earlier, when the film cuts from Vivian reminding Nick that the movie adapted from the screenplay needs "a trailer moment", to Nick firing the shotgun at a clay pigeon.
    • Played for laughs in this trailer for the Digital HD release. By amplifying the Homoerotic Subtext, and taking some other lines out of context, it turns the movie into a Romantic Comedy.
  • Unbreakable's trailer makes it out to be a psychological thriller involving a train crash likely to capitalises on the acclaim of the director’s previous film, the fact that it’s actually a superhero film (albeit a grounded, somber one) isn’t in any way signified to the viewer. Shyamalan even blamed Touchstone Pictures’s marketing for the film’s initial mixed reaction from audiences who came in expecting a spooky drama and were nonplussed by the comic book theme.
  • Unstoppable:
    • The trailer would have you believe that the runaway train was carrying not only hazardous material, but also two passenger cars full of schoolchildren, who are in constant danger of being either blown to bits or crushed to death. In reality, the kids are on a different train and are safe and sound 15 minutes into the film.
    • The trailers make the film seem more thrilling than it actually is. The real film is more of a drama with a few action elements.
  • George Clooney's film Up in the Air has Clooney saying many life-affirming quotes in voiceover, making it appear that he's some sort of frequent-flier-mile-happy life coach a la Love Happens. A later trailer reveals the character is the complete opposite: he's "hired by companies to fire people when they don't have the balls to do it themselves," and the young airline stewardess-like woman is his protégé. He does make money by being a life coach on the side, but this is more of a subplot. The philosophy he teaches is also extremely cynical, contrary to the trailers. At least initially.
  • 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.

    V 
  • The trailer to Vulgar somehow managed to make the films seem lighthearted.
  • The infamous So Bad, It's Good film Vampire's Kiss, featuring Nicolas Cage in his most over the top performance, was actually advertised as a romantic comedy. The actual film is a psychological horror similar to American Psycho, where Cage plays a mentally disturbed rich publishing executive who thinks he was bitten by a vampire.
  • The trailer for Vision Quest makes it look like a lightweight romantic comedy rather than the hard-hitting sports drama with a romantic subplot it actually is.

    W 
  • The Wanted movie trailer has the male and female leads kissing. It looked like they were going to be romantically involved but it was just a fake kiss to show up his ex-girlfriend, and their only kiss in the movie. There is also no indication whatsoever that the film is based on a graphic novel, nor is there any mention of it: a relatively easy thing to gloss over, given the film's omission of the costumes worn in the source material. And of course the movie actually had almost nothing to do with the book.
  • Warriors of Virtue looked like a serious martial arts fantasy movie. It took until Harry Potter to realize kids movies don't have to be cheesy.
  • In a trailer of The Warrior's Way, one of the main characters said "ninjas...damn". It became a fairly popular phrase, but is never used in the actual scene in the actual movie.
  • The Watchmen trailer makes it look makes it look like Dr. Manhattan, not Rorschach, is the point of view character.
    • More so it makes Rorschach look like the villain, ending the trailer with the line: the world will look up and shout "save us" and I'll whisper "no". Also every trailer and summary for the movie features the whole "superheroes are being killed off" bit when in fact the Comedian is the only one who is killed by an assassin, the rest all being retired (or dead already).
      • Might be interpreted as a bit of Fridge Brilliance in the case of Rorschach: For people who haven't read the original graphic novel, it attempts (intentionally or not) to derail the whole Misaimed Fandom thing from the start.
    • The trailers were very action oriented. It seems like every action shot in the movie made it into the trailer, making the movie seem more action packed than it was, which pissed off a fair few filmgoers.
  • Trailers for The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep suggested it would be a kiddy film about a boy and his cute little water dragon, in the tone of Babe. One trailer even showed the bulldog saying it was the titular horse's "best friend". Sure, the movie starts out this way, but for the most part it's a lot more gritty than that, especially when the water horse grows up. It nearly kills the boy, and devours all the lake's wildlife. Towards the end, the military mistakes the water horse for an enemy sub and nearly kills him and the boy. Oh, and that bulldog who is supposedly the horse's best friend? Towards the end, when the water horse goes berserk, he swallows the dog whole and then tries to kill the owner. Make one wonder if the marketing people even watched the movie, there wasn't any hint of friendship between the dog and the water horse. The dog spends the earlier part of the film trying to catch the water horse when it's a baby, and then spend the end of the film in the water horse's belly. Combine all that with a boy who is counting down the days when his father will come home from the war only to slowly realize that his father is never coming back since he's dead and it's far from the happy-go-lucky mood of the trailer. That said, it isn't a depressing film and there are some heartwarming moments.
  • The Way of the Gun's misleading trailer made it look as though it was going to be a farcical comedy, when in fact the movie itself is a fairly sullen action flick.
  • A scam trailer for What About Bob? for anyone who hadn't seen the actual trailer when it came out makes it look like a horror movie.
  • The trailer for the film version of Where the Wild Things Are makes it look like it'd be a fun, cute kid's adventure movie about a little boy who befriends a bunch of monsters. The actual film, however, is pretty depressing.
  • Whiteout is insinuated in the trailer to be a sci-fi style horror film. It's more along the lines of a slasher/thriller film.
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit trailers had the scene where Roger gets a load of bricks dropped on him, but with a line of dialog that occurred slightly earlier in the scene. Some trailers included the "I'm a pig!" scene, which was cut from the film.
  • The trailer for Wicker Park is cut to seem like Fatal Attraction mixed with 'Stalker with a Crush' film, but in fact, it is a psychological drama about a man searching for his ex-girlfriend after he thinks he sees her two years after she disappeared. 'Love Makes You Crazy' in this film, but not in the expected ways.
  • The trailer for Wiener-Dog mostly focused on the dachshund, and combined with the title, led some viewers to think the movie would've had more of the dog. But the actual movie, outside of the first segment, has the dog largely in the background or sitting still for many scenes, with the humans taking more of the focus.
  • The trailers for The Wrestler made it out to be a bit of a modern Rocky, and one of those "sad person gets his or her life back together, heartwarming ensues," movies. It's actually quite the subversion - wrestling is his highly self-destructive form of escapism from his crappy life, which he tries and fails to get back together, then kills himself fighting in the ring.

    X 
  • The domestic trailer for The X-Files: I Want to Believe showed a Monster of the Week-style plot, matching decently to the movie. The international trailer went out of its way to pretend it was about aliens — it had blurry lights in the distance (actually car headlights) with reaction shots (from different scenes) and minimized the shots of the psychic and actual villains.
    • Most, if not all, of the trailers were framed in such a way as to make it seem like Mulder and Scully had broken up, using a scene in which Scully tells an FBI agent looking for Mulder that she no longer works with him to give the impression she hasn't seen in him awhile. In the film, she's lying to protect him, since he's still a wanted fugitive. They live together.
  • Minor example: TV commercials for X-Men Origins: Wolverine would feature some of the other mutants in the movie, with one of them noting Emma Frost. Her role in the movie is to turn into diamond at one point, making her more of a cameo than the semi-major character the commercial played her up to be.
    • This has happened with other characters like Deadpool as well. Some comments have been made about the TV spots, saying how ridiculous it is that a whole 30 seconds said more about the characters than their screen time throughout the entire film.
  • The TV spots for X-Men: First Class imply that Charles is pointing a gun at Erik as a threat; it's from a scene where they're training together.
    • Charles's line to Erik "A new species is being born. Help me guide it, shape it, lead it" isn't actually in the movie.
  • The first official trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past gives the impression that Wolverine will be sent back in time to recruit the primary mutant characters we met in X-Men: First Class, including Mystique (with a clip showing off her badass fighting skills coupled with spliced-together dialogue stating, "[We need her] because she's a cold-hearted bitch"), so that they can unite with the present-day X-Men to battle the Sentinels. This is actually the furthest thing from the truth: Logan's the only one who travels through time in the film, and it's for the purpose of uniting Charles and Erik in the past so that they can stop Mystique from carrying out the assassination that will lead to the creation of the Sentinels in the first place.
    • The "I don't want your future!" line from Young!Charles is directed to Logan and his memories, not to Future!Charles as the trailer implies.
    • In the first trailer, when Logan asks Magneto where he will find him, Erik says, "A different path, a darker path"; he's actually referring to Mystique in the movie, not himself. Not that it wouldn't apply to his past self just as perfectly.
  • One spot for X-Men: Apocalypse features Nightcrawler, having just been rescued from the mutant fight club by Mystique, gazing at her in awe and remarking, "You're her!" This gives the impression that Nightcrawler is recognizing her as his biological mother, and that a family drama is about to unfold. In reality, Nightcrawler recognizes Mystique as a mutant hero and revolutionary; the full line is, "You can transform! You're her! The Hero!" The issue of Nightcrawler's parentage never comes up in the movie, and there's no indication that he and Mystique are related.
  • The X-Men: Dark Phoenix trailer makes it look like Magneto helps Jean practice her powers, when in fact they are fighting over a helicopter.

    Y 
  • Most of the trailers for Young Frankenstein contain a scene that's not in the movie showing Fredrick, Inga and Igor in a room together with a book. Fredrick says, "I guess we can all use a little laugh," then they all get scared by a lightning strike. This scene isn't even included on the Deleted Scenes portion of the DVD!
  • The trailers for Your Highness make James Franco and Natalie Portman out to be equal billing with star/co-writer Danny McBride. In actuality, most of Franco's screen time takes place in the middle of the film and Portman doesn't show up for the first 45 minutes. Fourth-billed Zooey Deschanel is nothing more than an extended cameo (which somehow became an Averted Trope as she was barely in the trailers).
  • The trailer for Youth in Revolt made it look like Nick's family is living in a trailer home, when really, they were only staying in the trailer during the summer.

    Z 
  • The trailers for Zardoz features the titular entity saying "The gun is good...". Audiences who saw the film were understandably weirded out by the omitted second part, "The penis is evil."


Alternative Title(s): Film

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