Advertised Extra / Live-Action Films

• An increasingly popular trend is for blockbuster films to stunt cast well-known foreign actors in minor roles so that they can heavily promote that aspect to overseas markets where those celebrities are more popular.
  • A big example of this is Iron Man 3. Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing have extremely minor roles (and in fact, Fan's scenes were not even included in the American release), but the overseas trailers depicted both actors alongside Don Cheadle and Gwyneth Paltrow as though they were playing main characters.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past cast popular French actor Omar Sy as Bishop, and popular Chinese actress Fan Bingbing (there she is again!) as Blink. The two heroes each got their own posters and were featured in the various trailers and TV spots. In the actual film, they only appear in a few scenes and have minimal dialogue. Blink at least gets a few cool action scenes, though.
• The 2010s saw the rise of "geezer teasers", low-budget Direct to Video action movies built around luring-in a fading but still recognisable action star with promise of a quick and easy shoot-with a similarly brief screentime to match. Examples of this practice include Steven Seagal's last few films, Bruce Willis' infamous late-career movies and Sylvester Stallone's.
• 2012's Lama Rinpoche is the only character to be featured on any of the film's posters◊ and he's only in a couple of scenes in the film.
• Rick Genest, aka "Zombie Boy", was featured prominently in posters◊ for 47 Ronin. He appears in one scene in the film that lasts about three minutes.
• Jeanette from Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel: The boys and her sisters all get ample screen time, whereas Jeanette seems to fall by the wayside. Older fans know her from the 1980s cartoon as a genius, but this never really comes out. She's never seen without her sisters, and she gets about 5 minutes of screentime that isn't singing. Fortunately, she gets significantly more screen time in the third movie. Dave as well actually has much more of a minor role than the film let on, as he's hospitalized for nearly all of it. The main human in the movie is actually a relative of his played by Zachary Levi.
• Despite being hyped up as a major supervillain in trailers and posters, Alexei "The Rhino" Sytsevich has around five minutes of screen-time in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and we only see him as the Rhino for around two minutes. Alexei appears in exactly two scenes: the Action Prologue of the movie, and the final scene—where the credits roll just as Spider-Man swings in to fight him.
• A really weird backwards (though possibly deliberate) version happened with Angel Heart. For anyone who hasn't seen the movie, it really does look like Robert De Niro's character is such. He's always billed as a "special appearance" even though the posters and DVD cover prominently shows him in front of the leads, making it appear that the film is just overbilling an actor who in actuality only has one scene. In the actual movie, while he doesn't have as much screentime as the lead, De Niro does make multiple appearances and his character turns out to be Satan himself, suddenly making the cover in which he is prominently displayed make a disturbing amount of sense.
• Middle Eye is not the main character of Apocalypto or even its Big Bad. He just happened to be the most prominent silhouette on the film's poster◊.
• Art of the Dead: Despite his prominence in the credits, Richard Grieco plays a Teaser-Only Character who dies before the main action starts.
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: Elizabeth Hurley appears in the cold opening but is killed off before we see her name in the opening credits.
• In a way Beetlejuice kind of fits this trope, despite being the title character (sort of), and the main focus of all advertisements and promotional material is on screen no more than 17 minutes of the film's 92 minute run time. The film might as well have been called The Maitlands if it hadn't been for the fact that Beetlejuice stole the movie. Chances are the only scenes you remember are the scenes with him and the "Banana Boat Song" scene. The Broadway musical attempts to redress this by re-writing the plot so Betelgeuse now appears almost immediately and has a much more consistent presence and relevance throughout the story.
• The cover for Birdemic proclaims "Hollywood legend Tippi Hedren of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds co-stars." She only appears in one scene. In archive footage on a TV.
• Taken to the extreme in the Thai action-comedy duology, The Bodyguard (Thai). Both films had a cameo from the then-upcoming superstar Tony Jaa (who just made it big with the first Ong-Bak movie a couple years ago), where his screentime in both movies combined totals to below 4 minutes... and the posters and promotional materials are promoting the hell out of Jaa's presence with his face on the covers and posters. The second movie even proudly states, "Featuring the Return of Tony Jaa".
• Brimstone: Kit Harington receives top billing and his face is even on the cover, but his character only has a few scenes.
• The 2010 Religious Horror movie Camp Hell had a case of this with Jesse Eisenberg that actually resulted in legal action. One of the movie's posters consisted almost entirely of his face and the title and he was highlighted in the trailer, but his character only appeared in a few flashback scenes. As a result, Eisenberg sued the distributor, Lionsgate Entertainment and Grindstone Entertainment, for fraudulent advertising.
• After Robin Williams became famous, he was given top billing in re-releases of his feature film debut Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses? which is a series of sketches involving sex jokes, Williams only appeared in two segments amounting to a minute of screen time.
• The beginning of Celeste and Jesse Forever imply the film is going to be evenly split between Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) but after ten minutes they stop hanging out together and the story sticks with Celeste; Jesse remains in the film on and off and he is important to the plot but he's definitely a supporting character in Celeste's story and gets far less screentime overall.
• Roux (Johnny Depp) in Chocolat was advertised on all the posters, but actually doesn't appear until an hour into the movie and only has a minor role compared to the less advertised characters.
• Clash of the Titans gave special focus to Danny Huston as Poseidon, Luke Evans as Apollo and Alexa Davalos as Andromeda. None of them gets more than about five minutes of screen time. In the latter two cases, the movie underwent extensive re-shoots and their characters ended up severely cut down. There was also considerable hype about some of the other Greek Gods, such as Hestia and Artemis. They would have had only a couple of lines in group scenes.
• In Country Crush, Jana Kramer receives top billing and takes up the majority of the cover while only being a supporting character while the actual main characters are reduced to the bottom third of the cover.
• Tyra Banks appears prominently on the posters for Coyote Ugly giving the impression she's one of the main characters. In fact she only has two scenes, and a brief appearance at the end, and her character leaving the titular bar is what opens up a job for the protagonist.
• Joel McCrea receives top billing in Cry Blood, Apache, but only appears for about 10 minutes in the segments that bookend the main story. And he interacts with no other character in the film.
• Ultra Violet receives top billing in Curse of the Headless Horseman'. She appears in one scene as a foreign noblewoman looking to buy the ranch: a scene that has no bearing on the plot.
• The official Netflix title card for Da 5 Bloods prominently features Chadwick Boseman, likely due to the popularity of Black Panther (2018). In the actual movie, he plays a Posthumous Character who, while extremely important to the plot, only shows up in a few Flashbacks and as a ghost/hallucination near the end.
• Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) gives Florinda Bolkan a featured and credit in the opening credits. Bolkan's role amounts to a two minute, wordless cameo as Martin's escort in the wedding scene.
• Mr. T in D.C. Cab. The advertisers were hoping to cash in on his popularity from Rocky III, despite the fact that his character, aside from one memorable monologue in front of the Lincoln Memorial, has about as much screen time as most of the non-essential characters of the company (which, by the way, included Bill Maher and Gary Busey).
• DC Extended Universe:
  • The advertising campaign for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice heavily advertised the fact that Gal Gadot would be making her debut as Wonder Woman in the movie, and that Jason Momoa would be making his debut as Aquaman. Though neither of them were actually pictured in the posters for the movie, Warner Bros. widely distributed publicity photos of them in costume as their characters, released action figures of the two for the film's various toy lines, and prominently featured footage of Gadot in the final trailer. In the actual movie, however, Wonder Woman is a minor supporting character at best, and doesn't appear in costume until the climax of the movie; if the trailers and publicity photos hadn't given it away, moviegoers might actually have been surprised to learn that the mysterious European antiquities dealer was Wonder Woman all along. Aquaman is even worse: Jason Momoa never even appears in the flesh, and is only seen in some brief submarine footage in Lex Luthor's metahuman research archives. Ironically, Ezra Miller's The Flash has actual dialogue and screen time, but he wasn't featured in advertisements and didn't get an action figure.
    • After many fans and professional reviewers reacted very positively to this film's incarnation of Wonder Woman despite the film itself otherwise being panned, many covers for the DVD and online release went so far as to feature Wonder Woman front and centre, with Superman and Batman behind her in "sidekick" position.
  • Suicide Squad:
    • The Joker was the focus of much of the film's marketing, but the majority of his scenes were cut, causing complaints from viewers and even Jared Leto.
    • Katana was pretty prominently advertised as well, but in the movie, she doesn't have a lot of lines or screentime.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League: Jesse Eisenberg is billed amongst the main cast, but is only seen in the Genesis Chamber in the opening credits without a word spoken, and in the epilogue having a conversation with Deathstroke.
  • Wonder Woman was featured in TV spots for SHAZAM! Fury of the Gods and even received an action figure in the tie-in toyline, despite her appearance essentially being a cameo at the end of the movie.
• Death Note Series:
  • Ryuk is seen in most promotional material and advertising for L: change the WorLd, most prominently being featured on posters for the film. Despite this however, he only appears in one scene.
  • The new human Death Note user, Sakura Aoi, as well as the Shinigami Bepo, are seen and hyped up in promotional material such as stills or posters for Death Note: Light Up the New World. Ironically enough however, Sakura is killled off in the film's first act whereas Bepo is seen in only one scene.
• Nickelodeon advertised Drake & Josh Go Hollywood with "Don't miss Miranda Cosgrove in the Drake & Josh movie". Miranda's character isn't a protagonist in the movie.
• Many trailers and posters for Dumb and Dumber To feature the famous sheep dog van from the first movie. Unfortunately, it was only featured in the actual film for a few seconds before it crashed, forcing our heroes to find another vehicle.
• Emma Roberts is one of the three actors to appear on the poster for the 2013 crime drama Empire State, even though she gets minimal screen time in the actual film. Strangely enough, Michael Angarano doesn't appear in any of the promotional material despite playing one of the main characters.
• Sarah Manninen gets second billing in Eternal, but her character Wildcat is Elizabeth's first victim and dies in the opening scene.
• EuroTrip: The Absinthe Fairy appears on every poster and advertisement, even though he only appears in two scenes of the finished film. Like Scrat, he is a fan favorite since its release.
• Jenna Jameson's appearance in Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain is hyped to the point of her receiving top billing. Her actual role is only a few minutes of screen time, and has no bearing on the plot.
• Steven Seagal received top billing on Executive Decision despite his character dying before the cast even got on the plane. This was perhaps purposefully invoked as the movie's initial twist was that it had a Decoy Protagonist.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in The Expendables. The two actors were featured on nearly every advertisement for the film but appear in only one scene. The trailers for the first sequel showed that Arnie and Bruce were getting more screen time of the action variety, though they're still not the lead characters. For that matter, both Toll and Hale also have very minor roles despite having equal billing in the film. The only real members of the team to have any major roles are Barney, Lee, and to a lesser extent Yin.
• Michelle Rodriguez in Fast & Furious. Her role in the sixth film made up for it.
• Most trailers and TV spots for The Fighting Temptations prominently featured Steve Harvey who plays an alcoholic radio host. While he is featured in a total of eight scenes (two are just voice overs), each appearance is brief and all he does is provide comic relief through his glaringly obvious commentary. He never interacts with any of main characters, except once. In spite of all this, Harvey receives fifth billing in the opening credits.
• Ghost in the Shell (2017): The members of Section 9 have their own posters and their actors, including Canon Foreigner Ladriya, revealed details about their characters while promoting the movie. With the exception of the Major, Batou and Aramaki, the rest barely have some screentime in the movie itself.
• Duke in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, who goes from star in the previous movie to dead in the first minutes.
• For The Giver, Taylor Swift was heavily advertised as Rosemary, a Posthumous Character who appears in perhaps three scenes.
• Godzilla:
  • Trailers heavily featured Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame, as it was his first big film role since the show ended. His character is important in the beginning of the film, but dies at about the end of the first act.
  • Godzilla himself falls under this. He gets sparse screentime and isn't the one driving the story, despite several trailers portraying him as the main threat.
• The Golden Compass heavily advertised Daniel Craig, Eva Green and Sam Elliott. The first two have about ten minutes of screen time, with Elliott not appearing until an hour in. Word of God is that a whole hour of footage was cut by the studio.
• Robert De Niro's role in 1998's Great Expectations is pretty small but he's advertised as one of the four leads. A better choice for 4th lead might have been a then-unknown Chris Cooper.
• The DVD cover of Half a Sixpence features the main character, Kipps, along with a beautiful woman in a lacy leotard. That character, whose name is Laura, only appears in one scene early in the movie.
• Early Halloween: Resurrection trailers heavily featured Jamie Lee Curtis and made it seem as though she played a big part in the movie. She ended up appearing in one scene at the beginning... before being killed off. She is also positioned at the forefront of the movie poster◊. It could be argued that she is actually a Decoy Protagonist since viewers obviously weren't supposed to see her death coming.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Julie Christie as Madam Rosmerta. One scene with about three minutes of screen time. And no close-ups of her (since the entire scene is from under Harry's invisibility cloak).
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix advertised Natalia Tena's Tonks with plenty of merchandise and even a special feature on the DVD with her giving a tour of the set. She's only in the film at the start and the big battle at the end.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince gave rather lots of attention to the twins Hestia and Flora Carrow in marketing. The characters have no lines and only appear in the Slug Club scenes. They were originally supposed to serve as a clue that there were two Vanishing Cabinets - when Harry realises the one in Borgin & Burke's has a twin but that plot point was dropped. As such the twins serve no purpose. The film also made a note of advertising that Gemma Jones was returning as Madame Pomfrey. She has just one scene, no lines and is only in the background.
    • The credits and DVD release give an incredibly high billing to Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew...who appears for less than a minute and has no dialogue.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 devoted some attention to Bill Nighy's casting as Rufus Scrimgeour. He has just two scenes.
• A Haunting in Venice places a masked gondolier prominently in its movie poster, standing just behind the lead Kenneth Branagh. This seems to imply the gondolier will play a major role, likely as a disguise for the murderer, but their only role is to transport the various characters through Venice at the start of the movie.
• Edge's feature film debut in Highlander: Endgame was heavily promoted by WWE, including a mock in-ring Academy Awards ceremony and an Entertainment Tonight segment in which Edge invited co-stars Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul backstage. Edge's screen-time totals about two minutes with two brief lines of dialogue and a single, extremely truncated fight scene that's played mostly for laughs.
• This was Played for Laughs in Ring of Honor, where Matt Taven went out of his way to promote "his" feature film, "The Ghostbusters Featuring Matt Taven" while he was sidelined with an injury.
• Hereditary has an interesting marketing strategy. All over the promotional material, not to mention posters and trailers, Charlie, the youngest child, is shown EVERYWHERE, making viewers think she's gonna be a main character. Guess what? 30 minutes in, and her head has been decapitated by a telephone pole. Still, we can see that she is part of the plan of a Paimon cult, and her decapitated head, which we get a clear shot of the next morning, is later sticked onto a Paimon statue..
• Hook drew a lot of press from Phil Collins having a cameo as a police officer. Collins actually got worried that the press was making him out to have a larger role in the film - and feared people would think his scenes had been cut because he wasn't good.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Liam Hemsworth as Gale did appear in quite a bit of promotional material like posters and did a fair amount of press, but wasn't in much of the movie since Gale isn't a participant in the Hunger Games. Though Hemsworth isn't a big name, he's an up and comer that the studio wanted to promote. Also, Gale becomes a more prominent character as the series goes on. Sort of. This is actually a complaint about The Hunger Games in general - it treats Peeta/Katniss/Gale like a big triangle, but Gale barely appears in the first two books of the trilogy at all, thus making it fairly obvious who Katniss will end up with.
  • Jena Malone as Johanna in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. In Part 1 she only appears briefly at the very end. In Part 2 she has just three scenes. Some of her scenes appear to have been cut.
  • Josh Hutcherson as Peeta in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Despite being a major character in the series, he spends nearly the whole film as a prisoner of the Capitol, so only appears in their propaganda broadcasts until the very end of the movie.
• Hurricane Bianca: The Movie Poster and DVD cover lists the main cast as Roy Haylock, Rachel Dratch, Alan Cumming, Margaret Cho and Ru Paul. Cumming and Cho are both One Scene Wonders and Ru Paul has a few short scenes as a weatherman on TV.
• Joan Crawford gets top billing in I Saw What You Did, but her role— while important to the plot —amounts to 9 minutes on screen.
• The trailer to Icebox makes it seem like there's a romance element to the plot. The girl is actually a nameless character who doesn't appear in any other scenes.
• Take Up to Eleven with Idlewild. In the trailer, you see a shot of comedian Bruce Bruce as a bodyguard leaving a room. Once you see the film, you realize that the trailer showed his entire role.
• Much of the criticism toward Inglourious Basterds comes from a feeling that the Basterds are this trope, not helped by the American marketing focusing heavily on Brad Pitt's titular crew. The European marketing made the Ensemble Cast a bit clearer.
• Johnny Depp as the Wolf in Into the Woods. Despite receiving major credit in the promotions and trailers, the character's only in two scenes.
• The marketing for Jack and Jill in Mexico made heavy emphasis on including Eugenio Derbez in all the materials, making it look like he was a big character in the movie, while in the movie itself his role was fairly minor.
• Sally Kirkland gets second billing in Jack the Reaper, but only has a few minutes screen time, dropping Harold off at school for the field trip. Her character is not even named, but is listed in the credits as Harold's Nana.
• The James Bond movies have a few examples:
  • Paris Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies. Her role was heavily promoted due to her being played by tv star Teri Hatcher; she stands beside Michelle Yeoh on the film poster, implying that they have equal importance. Her total screentime is about 15 minutes. The only important thing she does is tell Bond about the secret lab on the roof of Carver's printing facility in Hamburg. She is murdered offscreen for her troubles, her death marking the end of the first act.
  • Severine in Skyfall, who appears in the movie just long enough to give her tragic backstory before sleeping with Bond and getting tied up and murdered by Silva in front of an indifferent Bond just barely into the second act.
  • In Spectre, Lucia Sciarra, played by Monica Bellucci, was lauded as being the oldest Bond Girl in the series and was expected to be a game-changer. Everything about that sentence is a lie. Not only is she not the film's leading Bond Girl, but she doesn't even qualify as the Secondary Girl, which this movie lacks. She gets exactly five minutes of screentime despite being promoted as a major character in the film, with some suspecting that further scenes were left on the cutting room floor. As for her age, even if she had been the main Bond Girl of the movie, she would have been the oldest as of filming but not the first one to be older than Bond. Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore from Goldfinger) was 5 years older than Sean Connery, and Diana Rigg (Tracy Draco from On Her Majesty's Secret Service) was a year older than George Lazenby. Incidentally, Belluci previously auditioned to play Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, who, as mentioned above, was also an example of this trope.
  • No Time to Die: Despite being promoted as part of the main cast, Paloma (Ana de Armas) only appears in one sequence and has around ten minutes of screen time. This was perhaps hinted at by the various trailers which only ever showed Paloma in the same outfit and one action sequence.
• John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum: Despite being featured heavily in the trailers as Wick's partner, Halle Berry's character Sophia is only in the movie for about 20 minutes during the second act.
• Ving Rhames is listed as one of the stars of Julia X, but only appears in the final scene of the film, and has less than 5 minutes screen time.
• In Juno, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) was heavily emphasized in the promotional material and trailers. In actuality, he's a supporting character and goes Out of Focus in the second half of the film.
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Channing Tatum was prominently featured in the posters and received top billing. However in the film itself, his character appeared in 10 minutes before he was put on ice after being infected by the Big Bad's drugs and only showed up near the end where he joins the newly revived Kingsman.
• Gary Oldman in Lawless, who was heavily featured in the promotional material and received third billing. In the actual film, Oldman appears in only a few scenes and is billed no less than tenth in the ending credits.
• Every original release poster and trailer of Lawrence of Arabia prominently features Jose Ferrer (Oscar winner for Cyrano de Bergerac) as the Turkish Bey, who appeared for two scenes totaling less than five minutes in length. Avoided through various re-releases, as Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif have long since eclipsed Ferrer's fame.
• Helena Bonham Carter is in The Lone Ranger for about 10 minutes tops (in a 150 minute film). The marketing made her out to be the lead female.
• Rowan Atkinson was one of the actors featured on the posters for Love Actually and yet he only appeared in two short scenes and none of the threads in the movie featured him as a major character. Keira Knightley also got high billing (having just become well known with Pirates of the Caribbean), despite only being in four scenes and playing a supporting role in all of them.
• Michelle Williams is featured prominently in the trailers and is on every poster for Manchester by the Sea, even though she has less than ten minutes of screentime. Kyle Chandler also gets prominent billing on the poster even though he plays a Posthumous Character who only appears in a couple of flashbacks. They're both billed above a then-unknown Lucas Hedges, who plays one of the film's main characters.
• Manhunter was broadcast on TV immediately after the phenomenal success of The Silence of the Lambs but the title was changed to Red Dragon: The Pursuit of Hannibal Lector. Of course, anyone who saw the movie in 1986 or read the book would realize that Lector (played by Brian Cox) had about eight minutes of screen time and being that the story is set prior to Silence of the Lambs, Lector is still behind bars for the entire film. The character being pursued was a serial killer called The Tooth Fairy (real name Francis Dolarhyde). Lector's influence is marginal and is mostly part of the main character's backstory. The name change and subtitle was just an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the recent 1991 blockbuster by broadcasting a little remembered film that was based on the previous book in the series.
• David Walliams received top billing for his one scene in Marmaduke.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Maria Hill was featured on many of the posters of The Avengers alongside the team and Nick Fury. Ultimately she gets one action scene to herself in the first ten minutes, and after that is mostly a bystander. As she has at least three deleted scenes, it's safe to say that much of her material was cut for time. Some have theorised it was an attempt to disguise the glaring fact that Black Widow was the only female Avenger.
  • Nick Fury got a lot of presence in the posters and trailers for Avengers: Age of Ultron, despite his role being much smaller than in the first one.
  • Sharon Carter in Captain America: Civil War. She is heavily featured in the merchandise and promotional art for the film as a member of Team Cap, including illustrations of her fighting alongside the others against Team Iron Man. In the actual film, she never suits up in the uniform she's seen wearing in the illustrations, nor does she officially join Team Cap or fight against Team Iron Man.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming:
    • Iron Man's supporting role was greatly played up, with the character being prominently featured in the marketing and merchandise. In reality, Tony only shows up in a few scenes, and only one of those actually has him wearing the armor.
    • Likewise, Zendaya's mysterious Michelle was prominently featured on the theatrical poster, even though the character doesn't get much screen time. This is particularly egregious since Ned, who has a much larger role, and Liz, who is Peter's actual love interest, aren't on the poster.
  • Odd example with Doctor Strange's role in Thor: Ragnarok. He only appears in one scene in the first act, and most of the promotion for the movie made sure to avoid exaggerating the size of his role. However, the preview for the movie included in the guide for the D23 expo definitely tried to make it seem like Strange had a much larger part than he actually does, likely due to the success of his solo movie:
    If you need even more intergalactic, world-saving action, Thor: Ragnarok in November brings together Thor, the Hulk, and Doctor Strange to face off against intergalactic baddies both familiar and new.
  • Due to the massive success of his solo movie just a few months prior, T'Challa and his supporting cast were heavily featured in most of the later marketing for Avengers: Infinity War. In the actual film, they don't really get to do much until the last act. Shuri in particular (who was very prominent in the print advertisements) only gets about two scenes before she disappears from the movie. This led to Honest Trailers jokingly speculating that Marvel did not expect the Black Panther film to be nearly as popular as it ended up being back when they were planning Infinity War.
  • One year later, Avengers: Endgame had Danai Gurira billed and appearing on the poster, given she's one of the few main characters who survived the previous movie. She appears in at most three scenes, none very prominently. Benedict Wong is also in the poster, and yet Wong's first appearance in the movie is right in the climactic battle in the third act, bringing in the sorcerers to fight Thanos's forces. And then there's the star of the movie released right before, Carol Danvers, who as soon as her movie became a hit got heavily promoted. (and in fact, was also hyped in The Stinger for Avengers: Infinity War, being the person Nick Fury calls once he realizes it's the worst kind of disaster). She is sidelined by her own missions shortly after the Time Skip, and only returns for the climax - though her case is justified by Carol being as powerful, if not more, than the villain.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Marketing heavily played up Sinister Strange, an evil Alternate Self of the main hero, as if he were the film's Big Bad. He actually shows up in the third act of the movie and only for a single scene. This was to hide the fact that the actual antagonist of the movie is Scarlet Witch. There's also how Michael Stuhlbarg, who returned from the previous movie, gets prominent billing for what ends up being a single scene in the beginning.
  • The marketing and merchandise for Thor: Love and Thunder prominently featured the Guardians of the Galaxy, with the team appearing in the trailers and both Star-Lord and Groot getting action figures in the film's tie-in Marvel Legends wave. In the actual movie, the Guardians part ways with Thor in the first act and don't show up again.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania gives prominent billing to Bill Murray as well as a character poster for his character Krylar, even though he only shows up in one scene and has a fairly minor impact on the plot.
• Mary Reilly bills Glenn Close with And Starring. She has only three scenes.
• Men in Black 3 has Lily, the Fanservice with a Smile girlfriend of villain Boris played by Nicole Scherzinger. She only appears to free Boris in the opening sequence, then he unceremoniously dumps her by letting her be sucked into vacuum. In a sense, there's also Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K. Agent K does have a significant role in the movie...but it's the young Agent K, played by Josh Brolin, whereas Jones is only in the beginning and end.
• Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears keeps the credits order from Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, so Ashleigh Cummings receives second billing behind Essie Davis, despite appearing for only a few minutes.
• Even though you probably didn't get a good look at his face in the split second it's on the screen (Josh Holloway, aka Sawyer, by the way), you probably associate the trailers for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol with a man jumping off a rooftop, spinning around and firing several shots in freefall. This is taken from a scene fairly early on in the movie, and while the character is pretty plot important and does survive the fall, he doesn't live for long afterwards.
• Kaya Scodelario as teenage Eve in Moon receives top billing despite having only a minute or two of screen time. To a lesser extent, Dominique McElligott who plays Tess is only seen in a handful of flashbacks and videos. Justified as the only actors who have any significant screen time are Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey.
• Most Likely to Die: Jake Busey's character plays almost no role in the plot and is killed in his second scene. He has maybe 5 minutes screen time.
• Motorama: A young Drew Barrymore's face appears as a giant, floating head behind the main character on the video cover, but she's only in the film for a few seconds in a dream sequence.
• The Muppets (2011): Pepe. He was featured pretty prominently in some of the trailers, but it turns out most of that footage came from the one scene he was in that remained in the final cut.
• In Mystery Road, Jack Thomson is billed third in the credits and gets his name on the poster despite appearing in only one scene in the movie.
• The trailer for The Next Three Days plays up Liam Neeson's role in the movie, but he's in it for a grand total of about five minutes and doesn't show up again.
• The cast poster for I Not Stupid Too prominently features Jing-jing, a classmate of the protagonists, and their school's principal. Both characters only makes sporadic appearances throughout, and the former has lines countable on one hand.
• The Northman:
  • Björk was a major part of the film's promotion, but she only appears in one scene.
  • Willem Dafoe is similarly featured in the trailers yet only gets three scenes and one of them is voice-only after his character has died. The B-Roll footage reveals that at least one scene between him and Amleth was cut.
• Operation Crossbow: Sophia Loren is on the movie poster, but her character only appears for about fifteen minutes.
• Pacific Rim gives posters to all the Jaegers. The Japanese one, Coyote Tango, is barely in the movie, only appearing in a flashback.
• Sao Feng from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Like Angel, advertised as a great new addition to the cast. When it came out, roughly 30 minutes of screentime (in a movie that's almost 3 hours long!) and an anticlimatic death one hour in.
• Parodied in Planet Terror with Bruce Willis's villain Muldoon. Willis is front and centre on the poster, despite only appearing in one early scene and a few sequences in the final act. This parodies a B-movie tradition of casting a name actor in a small part and then hyping them up as if they were the star. Note that Willis rarely shares the frame with another actor in the film, giving the impression that his shots were all filmed separately in one short filming session. (this turns out to be predictive of Willis' later part of his career, with a lot of low-budget Direct to Video movies that proeminently feature him on the poster yet he appears only for a few minutes seemingly shot in a single day; everyone agreed Willis was getting easy paychecks to work little - and it turned out that he was doing those movies to get money for his aphasia-mandated retirement while he could still work)
• The advertising for the second Princess Diaries movie would have you believe Princess Asana, played by Raven-Symoné, was a main character. She wasn't.
• Christopher Walken appears only once in one of the most memorable scenes in Pulp Fiction and receives top billing.
• Emmanuel Howell was literally an extra in The Purge: Anarchy–he worked five days, had no dialogue and was only paid a few hundred dollars for his work–and was prominently featured on posters and billboards for the film. He considered suing for more money, but lawyers told him he didn't have a case because his contract allowed the studio to use his likeness however they wanted.
• The title character in Queen of the Damned does not appear until an hour into the movie (unless her statue form counts). The film draws elements not only from its own source novel (basically just the framing story, the book being mostly about the background which gets summarized in the movie in two sentences), but also from The Vampire Lestat, and he is the central character along with love interest Jesse Reeves (whose actress, Marguerite Moreau, never even gets a mention). There's also the fact that Akasha's actress, R&B singer Aaliyah, died six months prior to the film's release, and the movie was heavily promoted as her last "starring" role.
• In Roll Bounce, Nick Cannon and Mike Epps. Each are only in three scenes. Epps' garbageman Byron is pure comic relief alongside his partner Victor, played by Charlie Murphy, who doesn't even make the theatrical poster. More egregious is Cannon, who's skate rental clerk Benard gets ONE semi-dramatic scene, yet somehow pulls second billing on TWO DIFFERENT◊ DVD COVERS.◊
• Safety Patrol: Security Chief Penn (Leslie Nielsen) appears alongside Scout on the VHS cover. The back also prominently features Nielsen, and the description implies he's one of the main protagonists. In reality, he only has about ten minutes of screen time.
• Watching the first bit of Scream (1996), it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that Drew Barrymore is our main character. But, alas, she's offed after one scene.
• Scream and Scream Again: Peter Cushing's role is little more than a cameo: appearing in one brief scene and dying at the end of it.
• Happened with the 2009 DVD release of Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird — the cover features Elmo amongst the pictured characters, but the film was made in 1985, before he became a prominent member of the show's cast. In the film he only has a few seconds of screen time at the beginning and end, with only one line of dialogue (part of the song at the end).
• Seven Psychopaths gives good billing and poster placement to Olga Kurylenko, who appears for five minutes before she's killed off.
• Michael Jackson appears on the front cover of A Special Sesame Street Christmas, despite only showing up for less than two minutes and not singing.
• Sing Street: The trailers made it seem as if Evan had a bigger part. While his influence is definitely there, he's offscreen for most of the film.
• Advertisements for the classic movie musical Singin' in the Rain listed the names of all its stars, which was common at the time. However along with the people you would expect (Kelly, O'Conner, Reynolds, Hagen, Mitchell) they had Cyd Charisse. She was in the movie for less than 3 minutes as Kelly's dance partner during a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment (which was inside another Big-Lipped Alligator Moment). The strange thing is that Charisse was not a star yet; it probably would not have made a difference whether people saw the movie or not. You could chalk it up to fanservice.
• Franky Cook, played by Angelina Jolie in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, appears for about fifteen minutes of the film despite her extremely heavy presence in trailers and posters and Jolie's star billing. Audience disappointment over this has been credited for a lot of the film's bad post-release word-of-mouth.
• After Space Jam's massive success, Marvin the Martian popped up everywhere in the merchandise. In the real film, he only appears during the game as the referee, has 5-6 lines (all of which in the last 30 minutes), and is elbow jabbed offscreen by Bupkus right before the final match, and isn't seen again.
  • In Space Jam: A New Legacy, plenty of marketing prior to the release also featured Marvin, this time donning the Tune Squad jersey as a member of the team and even appearing on one of the main posters. While he has more lines than in the original, he appears much less. He has one debatably important scene dedicated to him, but only pops up twice briefly later on to get crushed by his space ship's hatch, neither of which is important to the plot and yet again, disappears from the rest of the film.
• Early promotional material for Space Jam: A New Legacy had Penelope Pussycat as part of the team. In the actual film she isn’t on the team and can only be spotted in the audience at the game.
• A somewhat debatable example with Venom in Spider-Man 3. Eddie Brock was around for most of the movie, but Venom is seen for all of 15 minutes. However, he did a lot in 15 minutes, including finally doing what no other villain in the movies could do; kill one of Peter's loved ones, Harry Osborn.
• Minnie Driver gets top billing in Stage Fright (2014), but her character is killed before the opening credits. Her only other appearance is in a brief flashback during the climax.
• Star Trek: Generations was a somewhat infamous case of this, since the marketing campaign for the movie focused almost entirely on the fact that it was going to feature a team-up between Captains Kirk and Picard, the protagonists of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The poster of the movie only showed Kirk's and Picard's faces next to each other, and the movie's Tag Line was "Two Captains, One Destiny". In truth? Kirk gets trapped in a Negative Space Wedgie in the first twenty minutes of the movie, and he isn't seen again until he's freed right before the climactic action scene, during which he unwittingly names a rather infamous trope.
• Star Wars:
  • Biggs Darklighter, Luke's best friend from Tatooine was almost completely cut out of the final film, save for his scenes during the Death Star battle. This didn't stop him from appearing in the tie in storybooks, comics, and at least one foreign poster (in place of Han Solo nonetheless).
  • Boba Fett is one of the prime examples of this trope. His sheer popularity and prominent marketing would make anyone who isn't familiar with Star Wars assume that he plays a massive role in the story. He even had his own action figure before The Empire Strikes Back was released. In reality, he has about a minute and a half of screen time, four lines, and his overall contribution to the plot is fairly minimal. His role is reduced even further in Return of the Jedi, where he has a minute of screen time, contributes nothing to the plot, and has one of the most disappointing/comical deaths of any character in the franchise. A lot of his current popularity comes from expanded universe material like The Bounty Hunter Wars...that didn't make it past the Legends reboot. Although then Boba had a memorable appearance in The Mandalorian that led to his own show.
  • The Force Awakens:
    • Captain Phasma was very heavily promoted but did little more than get about 5 minutes of screentime, most of which was spent getting her ass kicked, going down without a fight, and swiftly getting tossed in the garbage. Word of God had that her role would be expanded in The Last Jedi, but she had even less screentime, a brief fight, and was apparently Killed Off for Real.
    • Poe Dameron. He was heavily promoted as a main character, fueling speculation that he would be part of a new trio of heroes. While he's a major supporting character, he's ultimately just that—a supporting character. He vanishes for the entire middle act after getting separated from Finn on Jakku, and he spends the final act running interference with a Resistance X-Wing squadron while the main characters storm Starkiller Base to rescue Rey and confront Kylo Ren. Unlike Phasma, his role does get greatly expanded in The Last Jedi.
    • Lor San Tekka. Played by actor Max von Sydow, who played Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, whose original serials were a major influence upon Star Wars, he was highly expected to be a prominent character, but he's killed by Kylo Ren within the first five minutes of the film.
    • Luke Skywalker, bizarrely. He frequently got the Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer treatment in promotional material, but his presence in the movie was played up by Disney and Mark Hamill received second billing (Harrison Ford got first). In the finished film, he only appears in two very brief scenes, getting no lines and less than a minute of screentime.
  • The trailers for The Rise of Skywalker all featured Dark/Sith Rey fairly prominently, leading many to assume Rey would fall to the Dark Side for a significant part of the film. In reality, she appears in a vision that lasts about fifteen seconds and has only one short line.
  • Solo: Beckett's partner and lover Val (played by Thandiwe Newton) appears in several trailers and posters, but she doesn't survive the Train Job on Vandor-1.
• Despite receiving second billing in A Study in Scarlet, Anna May Wong only appears on screen for less than ten minutes.
• Though posters for Suffragette gave Meryl Streep, who plays Emmeline Pankhurst, top billing and featured her next to Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham-Carter and she was prominently included in the film's trailer, she only appears in person in one single scene in the entire film and has less than five minutes of screen time.
• Tower of Death is widely advertised as Bruce Lee's last film... despite being released eight years after Lee's death. The posters and promotional materials would advertise the hell out of Lee's presence, but in actuality all of Bruce's scenes are Stock Footage and his fights performed by an Obvious Stunt Double (the then-newcomer Yuen Biao''). In fact, Bruce's character dies before the first act and is quickly replaced by another protagonist.
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon promoted Shockwave as the new Big Bad quite non-subtly. Since you should Never Trust a Trailer, it turned out a Red Herring to hide a shocking Plot Twist and Shockwave only had two lines in the whole movie and pretty little screentime.
  • The trailers for Transformers: The Last Knight made it look like Izabella would have a large role in the film. Instead, she disappears almost completely after the first 15 minutes — in a film that's nearly 2 hours and 30 minutes long — with only a brief return appearance near the end. It's not just Izabella, lots of characters appear in the initial trailer only to be given a limited amount of screentime.
    • Nemesis Prime, the brainwashed Optimus, who is implied to be major character in the previews and trailers, doesn't appear to fight Bumblebee until near the end of the movie.
    • It also looked like Megatron would have a big role in the story, but after the first Autobot/Decepticon battle, which the Cons lost in the most embarrassing fashion ever, Megatron vanishes for the rest of the movie, and doesn't return until the climax, only to get one shotted by Optimus at the end.
    • Grimlock only has a handful of scenes in the entire movie, and never shows up for the final fight.
• Jack Black in Tropic Thunder is supposed to be one of three leads. In reality, his character is more of a Satellite Character. It doesn't help that Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. stole the show.
• Twinkle Twinkle Little Star has an early gag where an unnamed woman is subjected to a Marilyn Maneuver leading to a massive car pile-up. The woman doesn't appear for the rest of the film, but somehow her scene was proudly advertised on the poster.
• The Twins Effect features Jackie Chan in a 5-minute cameo. While the original Hong Kong DVD averts the trope by leaving Chan entirely out of all promotional materials, the same can't be said for the South Korean DVD release◊ plastering Chan all over the cover.
• Ultraman Gaia: The Battle In Hyperspace: The Japanese title of the movie is Ultraman Tiga, Ultraman Dyna, & Ultraman Gaia: The Decisive Battle in Hyperspace, despite the fact that Ultraman Tiga and Dyna only have 7 minutes of screentime combined (they play The Cavalry who arrives at the end of the movie to assist Gaia in battling Kingmons and his monster Co-Dragons, granted it's a Big Damn Heroes moment, but still...). Additionally, there are promotional materials and posters that features all three Ultras taking up roughly the same amount of poster space, when Tiga and Dyna are merely extras.
• Valentine's Day has a huge cast made up numerous A-listers. The movie was advertised one of two ways, the first was by advertising all of the stars, regardless of how big their role was or by saying it "starred" Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner despite them having roughly two scenes and their characters were clearly meant to be looked down upon. Even worse was that all the reviews focused almost entirely on Swift, judging her performance despite her being a cameo. The Spiritual Successor, New Year's Eve managed to avoid this by only advertising the stars that had major parts (in fact there are several stars who don't appear in the commercials).
• The marketing from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader placed a lot of emphasis on the White Witch, to the point of making her appear as the primary villain of the film. In fact, the character only appears sporadically, and only as an illusion- the real Witch never shows up at all. Tilda Swinton expressed surprise that she was in the trailer, saying she'd only been on set for "about twenty minutes". Additionally Peter and Susan were included in the trailer, despite Peter having just one scene and Susan two.
• In the film Welcome To Collinwood, George Clooney has little more than a cameo as the older criminal mentor-figure Jerzy, despite being very heavily featured in the trailers.
• The Wings poster gives fourth billing to Gary Cooper. His character, Cadet White only appears for three minutes at most before he dies performing stunts.
• The Direct to Video action film Wrong Side of Town actually starred Rob Van Dam. However you would not know that by looking at the DVD cover where Batista is featured front and center. He plays a minor supporting character that was only in three scenes. RVD was billed second and is in the background alongside third billed Ja Rule who was an even better example of this trope. The rapper plays a gang leader who is shot by Batista literally three minutes after being introduced. Fourth billed R&B singer Omarion has a similar role to Ja Rule. Strangely other actors that have bigger roles in this movie ^note  (Edrick Browne, Lara Grice, Jerry Katz, Ava Santana, and Louis Herthum) are not mentioned at all. According to some people this was because Batista was the best actor in it.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: The Last Stand:
    • Cyclops' screen time is greatly reduced because of James Marsden's other commitments.
    • Angel is featured heavily in all the promotional material, as part of the whole "the original X-Men team in the comics finally together in film." He only has three scenes: he refuses the cure and flies away; he very briefly shows up at the X-Mansion for the sole purpose of allowing them to state categorically that the school is still open; and finally he saves his father's life during the final battle. He does nothing in between. The promo posters even showed Angel in an X-Men uniform despite the fact that he never officially joins the team (or dons a costume) during the movie.
    • The same can be said of Colossus — he has one line (which is about as long as both of his two lines in X2: X-Men United combined) and he's really only in the film for the Fastball Special.
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Gambit has limited screen time, but manages to do a few things (sets/stops a fight between Logan and Sabretooth, takes Logan to the enemy base, and saves Logan in a Big Damn Heroes moment).
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Anna Paquin as Rogue has a total of one scene (and a handful of seconds at that) in the theatrical release. She even got her own Empire magazine cover despite the fact that most of her scenes were cut from the final film.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Jubilee got a fair amount of focus in the advertising along with the co-stars who played the new recruits Cyclops, Jean, and Storm. In the middle of the movie, it looks like she's going to be on the same squad of rookies with Cyclops, Jean, and Nightcrawler, even going with them on their teen rebel mall trip as a heroic team of four to contrast the Horsemen. Then she gets knocked out and left behind at the mansion in the next scene, leaving the others as a Power Trio instead.
  • The trailers and TV spots for Deadpool 2 heavily played up the introduction of X-Force, complete with most of the team getting their own Twitter Emojis. Domino is the only member of the team to actually get significant screentime, as Shatterstar, Bedlam, Zeitgeist, Peter and Vanisher are all Killed Off for Real very shortly after being introduced. The film's marketing was deliberately misleading — including filming extra footage of the characters for the trailers that was never intended for the film — to make their deaths come out of nowhere.
• Jay Laga'aia is billed prominently in Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, but actually plays one of the zombies, and gets maybe a couple of lines of dialogue before being turned.

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