25 Films That Hid What They Were in the Trailer

In distilling an entire film down to two and a half minutes or less, some things are bound to get lost in translation. With so much competition, the emphasis seems to be put on showing at least a little of every, major setpiece and giving audiences a strong idea of what to expect.

On the other hand, some trailers hide what the film really is - we've all seen trailers that have given us a certain expectation, only to leave us a little baffled once we see the final film. Sometimes it's to avoid giving away spoilers or keeping some surprises back for the film itself, but more often it's to convince an audience to see something that they might otherwise not.

We're not talking about the trailers that didn't give away the whole plot, because goodness knows that there aren't enough trailers that keep some of the big surprises until the film, especially in "four-quadrant" tentpole movies. We're not getting into TV spots either, as the focus in these ads is endlessly changeable depending on the demographic they're trying to reach, especially in "four-quadrant" tentpole movies.

These are trailers that actively engaged in misleading the audience about the film they advertised, either by omitting something pivotal or taking clips out of context to either genre-hop or tell a different narrative to the filmmakers' intentions. From mild porkies to downright sneakiness, here's our pick of the trailers that kept stuff hidden from the audience.

Honorable mention: Alien 3

The trailer: “In 1979, we discovered in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.”

The film itself... does not take place on Earth. As misleading trailers go, this may be the most infamous of all time, but in all good conscience, we can't include it on this list. This early teaser wasn't so much hiding what David Fincher's troubled sequel would become so much as taking a wild guess based on where development was at that point.

We've previously looked back at the fraught development process of this film on the site, but the trailer is worth a mention as a rare instance of a studio misleading the audience by completely jumping the gun on the film.

25. Reign Of Fire

The trailer: In the year 2084, humanity fights off an invasion of dragons.

The film itself... largely takes place in 2020. It comes to something when the trailer can't even get the date right. Anyhoo, the trailer for Rob Bowman's underappreciated fantasy thriller tends to make the characters' efforts look like the first response to dragon attacks, when it's actually a post-apocalyptic film in which most of the characters were born into a world destroyed by the fire-breathing bastards.

The result of having a trailer this kick-ass for a film that doesn't necessarily rely on action all the way through is to build up audience expectations unduly. For instance, the trailer gives entirely different meaning to the final shot of Matthew McConaughey leaping through the air with an axe, which actually turns out to be way more bad-ass, but with entirely different implications, in the film itself.

Oh and this is off-topic, but because we mentioned Reign Of Fire, we do have to give props to the film for having the greatest Star Wars reference in any movie ever. If you've seen it, you know what we mean.

24. House At The End Of The Street

The trailer: “To uncover the truth, you have to go back to where it all began.”

The film itself... is less impressive than the time-bending trailer. Edited by mOcean's Jay Bender, this acclaimed "Playback" trailer was at the forefront of Relativity Media's marketing re-mount of this Jennifer Lawrence thriller. Originally pegged for release in April 2012, it was pushed back several months in the wake of the buzz around The Hunger Games.

It's a pretty good trailer, but it hides the film's more grounded boy-next-door thriller leanings, which landed somewhere between Twilight and Psycho, with the reversed footage gimmick and a final shot that implies a possessed little girl. The film itself is one of those minor thrillers that would usually first be discovered on the DVD shelves at Asda - misleading as it is, that's an impressive turnaround.

23. Red Eye

The trailer... starts out as a romance between Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams as they wait to board a delayed plane, but he's got these demonic red eyes.

The film itself... like Reign Of Fire, is another underappreciated film that's well worth checking out - it's just that there's no supernatural stuff involved. The trailer for this Wes Craven gem crosses the line twice, first by setting up the meet-cute in the airport lounge, doing a well-worn trailer gag of setting up the film as one thing before veering into another genre.

The unnecessary CGI effect on Murphy's eye is a bit of a hat on a hat. The last 30 seconds of the trailer pumps up the adrenaline and makes it clear that this is going to be more of a thriller than it first appeared, but apparently can't resist tipping into supernatural horror that just doesn't exist in the film.

22. Star Trek: Generations

The trailer: Captains Jean-Luc Picard and James T. Kirk team up to face a dangerous new foe.

The film itself... is a big-screen handover from the original series to The Next Generation, but with much more emphasis on the latter. On the basis of this trailer, you would think that Picard and Kirk, along with their respective ships and crews, team up to fight off Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Soran, but they only really team up to beat him up at the end, with Kirk dying less than heroically in the process (Bridge on the Captain!).

On a related note, the trailer for the previous instalment, The Undiscovered Country, apparently showed Kirk being disintegrated. In the context of the film, this was a shapeshifter in Kirk's form, but at least they managed not to give away the real death scene in the sequel.

21. Hercules

The trailer: Demi-god Hercules fights off mythical beasts and protects a city from an immortal army.

The film itself... is a little more sceptical about that kind of thing. All of the mythical beasts in the trailer - the Hydra, the Erymanthian Boar and the Nemean Lion - appear only in the first five minutes of the film. In fact, they're part of a story told by Herc's nephew Iolaus, about events that may or may not have happened.

Brett Ratner's film, based on the graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian Wars, was a surprisingly fun romp. The flattening of more mythical aspects wasn't in the service of making a dark and gritty reboot, but presenting a more off-kilter adventure that frankly had its cake and ate it too when it came to the title characters' superpowers. Some viewers may have been tricked into it, but it was a cut above the other knock-offs of 300 we've seen in recent years.

20. About Time

The trailer: Time traveller Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) uses his gifts to woo a girlfriend Mary (Rachel McAdams) but accidentally erases his relationship while trying to make life perfect.

The film itself... is done with this side of the story by about an hour in - Tim only erases their first meeting, leading him to try and recreate their meet-cute. About Time is as romantic as any of Richard Curtis' movies, but it's a film about making the most of the time you've got, whether it's one lifetime or relative centuries. Added to which, it's more about Tim's relationship with his father, played by Bill Nighy.

In the second half of the film, with Tim and Mary happily wed, the focus shifts more to our hero's relationships with his wayward sister and ultimately, his father. The trailer shifts a father-son exchange from this part of the film to make it look like it's about Mary, and generally keeps the tone breezy and funny. The film itself gets a little more poignant as it goes on, as a result of the plot concentrating more on Nighy and Gleeson's characters than the trailer would suggest.

19. Bambi

The trailer: Originally it was billed as Walt Disney's adaptation of the animal romance beloved by book-of-the-month club readers. Latterly, it concentrates more on Bambi's childhood.

The film itself... is both, but it's another example of marketing that crossed the line twice, this time across the span of 60 years. Neither the original, more 'twitterpated' trailer nor the anniversary DVD trailer happen to cover the film's notorious unfortunate event - the death of Bambi's mother.

While the original dramatic trailer focused more on the grown-up Bambi and his coming-of-age struggles, the latter approach emphasises the cute baby animals, skittering around on the ice and such like. It's got to be tough to find an appealing way to broach that less than cheery middle ground in a trailer, but even after six decades of the film being out there, Bambi's mother still can't be here.

18. Drive

The trailer: An adrenaline fuelled crime drama in which a getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) gets mixed up with the mob after a heist gone wrong.

The film itself... follows that logline, but it's hardly Fast & Furious. In hindsight, this trailer doesn't misrepresent the plot of the film, but it does cherry-pick from each and every one of the action sequences, plus dialogue from several pivotal scenes from after the first hour, to bely the more laconic pace set by director Nicolas Winding-Refn.

Drive is held up as a modern classic of neo-noir cinema in many quarters, but not everyone was best pleased by the trailers - infamously, one woman tried to file a class-action lawsuit against the studio behind the film, as well as the cinema where she saw it, for featuring “very little driving”. But we're not even halfway through this list yet and there are definitely worse culprits.

17. Seven Psychopaths

The trailer: A knockabout hitman comedy about seven psychopaths.

The film itself... is a much darker hitman comedy about a potential film about seven psychopaths. The trailer even misrepresents who the titular psychopaths are - the title refers to alcoholic screenwriter Marty's script. The characters are mostly based on people Marty meets, but the trailer also suggests more prominence for Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko's characters by labelling them as psychos.

Seven Psychopaths may have been broader than Martin McDonagh's previous film In Bruges, which had a similar case of the trailer hiding how dark it really was. Both films are very dark as well as being very funny, but this is another case of the trailer doing some editing gymnastics to adjust the context of the story.

16. Paranormal Activity 3

The trailer: Undiscovered footage from the 1980s shows how the sisters from the first two films were terrorised as children.

The film itself... is pretty close to that, but with the notable omission of most of the apparently specially shot footage in the trailers. For instance, contrary to the trailer above, we don't get a scene where a house is burned to the ground, nor do we get to see a medium being telekinetically whupped by the paranormal gribbly.

We're all familiar with the complaints about the horror franchise's laconic pacing by now, and this trailer made the sequel look more eventful than it was. But the third film may be the most innovative of the sequels to date, and though it was more than a little disingenuous to hide the setpieces that made it into the film, they were undeniably better in context for not having been trodden over in every trailer before we even got into the cinema.

15. Jarhead

The trailer: An action-packed war movie about soldiers in Iraq, with comedic elements and Star Wars references.

The film itself... is Sam Mendes' deconstruction of war movies, in which the entire point is that the main platoon in the film never even see direct action. This makes the jokier elements much darker in context. Again, it's a well constructed trailer, and some of us still associate Kanye West's Jesus Walks with this film because the trailer is so effective.

In these heady days of American Sniper breaking the bank, it's worth noting that it finally gave some audiences what they wanted after seeing trailers like this, even if Mendes' film is probably the more thoughtful and realistic of the two.

14. The Grey

The trailer: In short, Liam Neeson: Wolf Puncher

The film itself... is a far more subdued and existential exploration of man versus nature, in which Neeson and co are screwed even if the wolves don't get them. With a limited CGI budget, we don't see a whole lot of the growling meanies when they do show up, and more survivors die from exposure to the elements than combat with wolves.

The trailer might give the impression of a cooler movie, but Joe Carnahan's film is actually more cold than cool, and it's all the better for it. It's just a shame that in the process of hiding that, the trailer goes up to, and includes the terrific final shot of the film.

13. Observe & Report

The trailer: Seth Rogen is a mall security guard who has to take down a flasher and get the girl.

The film itself... is a dark comedy, in which director Jody Hill doffs his cap to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle in the form of Rogen's manic-depressive Ronnie Barnhardt. The green-band trailers may or may not have capitalized on the success of family comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop, even though all concerned stressed that the two films are completely different.

In the age of online trailers, R-rated comedies can show off more raunchy stuff in red-band trailers like this one, which wouldn't normally pass for general audiences, but this misrepresents the film's pitch-black tone. For instance, there's an already dodgy shot of Ronnie having sex with an all-but-unconscious Brandi (Anna Faris) after she takes some pills, played for laughs.

In the film, she doesn't know she's taking Ronnie's prescription drugs and the sex scene is actually a date rape scene. Whatever your thoughts on the film and how it plays in context, it's a pretty reprehensible way to play it in the trailer.