Movies That Were Marketed As Something Totally Different

When it comes to filmmaking, there are really two teams of people that work on a movie. There's the team that produces the actual film, and there's the team that is responsible for marketing it to consumers. Most of the time, the people who make the trailer for a film weren't involved in the actual production, and the directors and producers of the movie themselves often serve as consultants to the editors – if they're involved in the trailer-making process at all. 

It's up to studio marketing teams and trailer editors to get people into theaters to see a movie, and sometimes they interpret that to mean that they need to fit every movie into a proven formula. High-concept sci-fi films become monster movies, heartbreaking indies become romantic comedies, and gothic romances are marketed as straightforward horror flicks. Editors and marketing departments can often do their films a disservice by oversimplifying structure and genre, and end up causing audiences to feel confused and disappointed because the film they saw advertised was nothing like what they ended up watching in theaters.

People might remember "Jennifer's Body" as the comedy-horror film starring Megan Fox that came out in 2009. They also might remember that many of the teenage boys in their lives were pretty excited to see it. The folks advertising the film took advantage of Megan Fox's status as one of America's most desired women at the time (thanks to her exploitative role in "Transformers") and decided to market it entirely to those teenage boys, despite the fact that it had an almost entirely-female creative team behind its production. 

The film was written by Diablo Cody — who also wrote the movie "Juno" — and directed by Karyn Kusama. Both Kusama and Cody made "Jennifer's Body" specifically to critique the use of the male gaze in the horror genre, as well as provide nuanced commentary on the high school experience for teenage girls and their friendships with each other. 

In an interview with Buzzfeed, Kusama explained that she vehemently objected to the idea that the film should be marketed to teenage boys. "I kept sort of reminding everybody, 'Guys, we can't market this movie to boys,'" she said. Even Fox herself has said that she believes the marketing for the film is the reason it didn't do well at the box office.

The film ended up with a mediocre box office result and mixed to negative critical reception, although it has since gained a cult following.

Despite the fact that David Fincher's 1999 movie "Fight Club" is now one of the most revered cult-classic films of the last several decades, it actually bombed in domestic theaters when it first came out, grossing only $11 million dollars on a $65 million budget during its opening weekend. Fincher loathed the marketing of the film (based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk) because it lazily relied on the star power of its leads, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, and then presented its unique brand of dark humor as the central motif of the film. While "Fight Club" has its funny moments, it's also a cynical, violent condemnation of capitalism, the establishment, and toxic masculinity.

The 20th Century Fox marketing team couldn't wrap their head around a movie where Brad Pitt's role was both intimidating to male viewers and too gritty for women to enjoy.  They marketed the movie at wrestling and boxing venues, not allowing David Fincher to screen the PSA-style ads with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt that he recorded himself in order to accurately express the artistic tone of the film. The marketing team didn't get it, so they made sure that no one else would either, and "Fight Club" didn't become the beloved movie it is today until well after its theatrical release.

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is a 1996 animated Disney film based on the 1831 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo. Hugo's original story is incredibly tragic, as most of the characters wind up dead by its end, so obviously Disney had to alter it quite a bit in order to make it more palatable for their young audiences. But even in writing a much happier ending for the movie, Disney still couldn't offset the inherently dark themes that prop up the entire story. 

It's not just that Frollo, who is the movie's main antagonist, is interested in Esmeralda, it's that he is specifically overcome with lust when he sees and interacts with her — lust that, perversely, he blames her for. Quasimodo is a good man who loves Esmerelda for treating him with kindness despite his physical disabilities, but ultimately Esmeralda still falls in love with the much more conventionally attractive Phoebus instead. Quasimodo is hailed as a hero by the people of Paris, but he still doesn't earn Esmeralda's love. And all of this is to say nothing of the anti-Roma sentiment on display from many characters in the film, especially Frollo, which makes "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" historically accurate but not exactly a fun romp for kids.

Disney made the cartoon a musical and used the movie's most upbeat numbers in its marketing, as well as a trio of talking gargoyles for comic relief. This meant that a lot of parents took their kids to see what they thought would be a straightforward successor to Disney's past animated features, but what was actually an incredibly dark story.

"Edge of Tomorrow," a 2014 sci-fi action film starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, had a positive reception, landing a high score on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences who saw the film liked it too, but many opted not to see it in theaters, which led to a disappointing domestic gross of only a little over $100 million — less than its production budget. The movie did far better at the international box office, earning back its production cost two times over, but that had more to do with Tom Cruise's star power than the marketing of the film.

In the U.S., many moviegoers were perplexed by the film's title, "Edge of Tomorrow." It sounded like sci-fi, yes, but it could just as easily describe an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story as it could an action-packed Terminator sequel. 

The film's narrative, in which the human race finds itself at war with a race of aliens that are able to predict the future, is based on a Japanese story called "All You Need Is Kill," and that's what the film was called up until 2013, when Warner Brothers decided to change the name. This, combined with a collection of trailers and promo materials that did nothing to convey the unique strengths of the movie's writing and plot, had audiences expecting a pretty generic action film.

You might only have a vague memory of the film "Annihilation," released in 2018 and featuring a cast of mostly women led by Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson. Based on a 2014 sci-fi horror novel by Jeff VanderMeer, the movie is set in a strange, alternate reality where a meteor has landed on Earth and caused the spread of something referred to as the "Shimmer." 

"Annihilation" is a high-concept, low-exposition story about a team of military personnel (mostly scientists) and their interactions with a strange new kind of life. It received favorable reviewers from critics, but didn't do particularly well at the box office. That probably had something to do with the fact that the studio distributing the film, Paramount Pictures, chose to capitalize on the plot's inherently mysterious premise and present it as a monster movie with a "Cloverfield"-esque lack of detail in its promotion. 

This isn't necessarily a bad description of the movie, but it doesn't really encompass "Annihilation" as a whole. It's not exactly a movie about fighting monsters, but rather about human arrogance and our narrow understanding of life. As with many science fiction films, its PR team struggled to find a way to market its unique storyline without spoiling it for audiences.