As in, you see a movie trailer, and based only on that trailer you make up the whole movie in your mind, and it ends up being different than the actual movie. Was your version better or worse?

I’ll go first: Men In Black 1 had a somewhat misleading trailer, where they’re about to shoot down the flying saucer at the end, and they say to each other “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” “Not a clue.” And they shoot. So in my mind it was two guys from the FBI who had to suddenly deal with the existence of aliens and learn to fight them on the fly, learning and making it up as they went along all the while learning to work with each other.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    3 days ago

    I wouldn’t say I’ve made up an entire movie because of it, but I have very widely missed what a movie was from its trailer.

    Kung Pow! Enter the Fist had such a shit trailer, I had no interest at all in seeing it. The only reason I did, was because my siblings wanted to go and my mom didn’t wanna drive so she paid me to take them. Had I known it was a comedy and how they made it, I would have actually been hyped. That shit was the funniest movie I ever saw up to that point.

    From the trailers I remember seeing at the time, I just thought they had simply brought an old kung fu movie that was only in Chinese or something to the US for the first time with English dubbing. And it didn’t look like a particularly good kung fu movie. They did absolutely nothing to make it look like a comedy, with the gag being that they were just riffing on an old kung fu movie.

    • Captain AggravatedOP
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      113 days ago

      Kung Pow is a hard movie to make a trailer for. It’s a movie that is best marketed by having a friend explain it to you.

      • @ch00f
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        53 days ago

        I remember the trailer I saw showing him dodging milk shot from a cow’s udder Matrix style. That did the trick for my 11y/o brain.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 days ago

      You might appreciate “What’s Up, Tiger Lily”. It’s a comedic re-dub of a Japanese spy flick.

    • @ABCDE
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      13 days ago

      How did they make it?

  • Pyrin
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    22 days ago

    A lot of trailers spoil things for me when I’m not even looking for the spoiler. Nothing really surprises me from what comes out of Hollywood anymore.

    I don’t need to watch blockbuster films when their trailers play the best parts and know how much of a budget was blown as to where the focus of the movie is going to be about.

    I don’t need to watch comedy films when the chances are likely that they put in the funnier bits in the trailer.

    I don’t need to watch horror films when the trailers play up the shitty effects and give you too many clues as to what it’s going to be about.

    This isn’t just simply shitting on films, it’s a matter of having watched so many, it’s second nature to you.

  • magnetichuman
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    63 days ago

    When I saw the trailer to Shutter Island, a film about a detective trying to solve a murder at a mysterious and secluded mental institution, I immediately guessed that the twist was going to be that the detective was actually a patient the whole time. This made me decide that I didn’t need to watch it and I never looked up a plot summary so I’ve no idea if I’m right.

  • Vanth
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    43 days ago

    Musicals tend to have misleading trailers, IMO. Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp comes to mind. I knew it was a musical because I was already familiar with the stage musical, but would not have guessed based on the trailer alone. I had friends similarly surprised that the 2024 Mean Girls is also a musical.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 days ago

      Studios do this on purpose because they know audiences don’t like musicals as much as they used to. They also will hide that its part 1 of 2.

    • @ch00f
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      13 days ago

      Yep. Legit didn’t know it was a musical. Walked out 10 minutes in.

    • @gedaliyah
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      13 days ago

      Nobody mention the Joker sequel…

  • @[email protected]
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    23 days ago

    I like this idea and more wish I was creative enough for this.

    In short: no, I have never done this.

    • Captain AggravatedOP
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      13 days ago

      ALL I saw of that movie during its promotional campaign was several scenes of really stupid transformer jet fighters and a bikini scene at a lake in a jungle?