Forgive the informality, but I’m just musing more than anything else today.

Have you ever seen a trailer for a movie that was so bad you wanted those two minutes of your life back? Or, on the flip side, have you ever seen one so amazing that you didn’t want to wait the one to six months for the film to actually be released? I’ve certainly experienced both. What sucks is going to see that movie with the amazing trailer and realizing that you already saw all the parts worth seeing in that one-minute TV spot. And every now and again, you decide on a whim to take a chance on the movie with the terrible trailer and you end up loving it.

Trailers are such a strange breed of media. Typically, an independent trailer-specific editing house, with no ties at all to the production of the full movie, will cut a trailer from whatever footage has already been shot. Their shot choices often differ from the shots that end up being used in the final cut. Sometimes they even use footage from scenes that will later get cut when they fail with test audiences. Even the music choices for a trailer are independent decisions. (Was anyone else sorely disappointed when that Coheed and Cambria song wasn’t in 9?)

I don’t want to get too much into the details of the business of making a trailer, or even the process. No, I just kind of want to complain.

Because trailers are constructed with little to no input from the creative team, what happens unfortunately frequently is that the tone of a trailer will differ wildly from that of the final film. They can be terribly misleading, resulting in wasted money on awful movies with fantastic trailers and box office flops that later become cult classics.

Take, for instance, the trailer for Beautiful Creatures.

Whatever your feelings about YA Lit-Turned-Movies, you can’t deny that that looks pretty freaking sweet. But there’s a reason you haven’t heard of Beautiful Creatures, and that’s the same reason they never turned any of the novel’s sequels into films. Despite having a rather poor marketing campaign — that trailer didn’t get shown much of anywhere — the film actually had a relatively good turnout. It just wasn’t that good. Looking back now, all you really need to see is the trailer. All of my personal favorite moments of the film are right there. There is some interesting dialogue about the nature of a person’s personality that’s missing, but at that point you’re probably better off reading the book. (I don’t actually know. I have the ebook, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Have you read it? Is it worth it?)

On the other side of the issue, assail your eyes and ears for a moment and watch the trailer for Malice. (Kindly forgive the beginning and end being cut off, and the Spanish subtitles. This is the only version of the original theatrical trailer I was able to locate.)

Based on that, would you ever want to see the film? No, probably not. But Malice is one of the most smartly written films I personally have ever seen, and I definitely recommend it. So then what’s the deal? Part of the problem with Malice is that the film changes directions midway through. That is to say, the first half of the movie is about something completely different than the second half. Upon watching the whole thing, you see why it has to be that way and how the two seemingly disparate parts fully fit together. But how do you market a film like that?

Unfortunately, this happens all too often. Take Source Code, for example.

The Jake Gyllenhaal-helmed project suffers from another bit of poor marketing on top of the bad trailer — the title is terribly terribly misleading — but, like Malice, it is difficult to describe precisely what the film is about without spoiling key and interesting plot points. I personally thank my lucky stars day in and day out that I was at a point in my life when I watched films based exclusively on whether or not the lead male was attractive. I saw a poster for Source Code and nothing else. My parents kindly purchased the Blu-ray for me for Christmas one year, and it remains one of my favorite films to date. It is deeply intellectual and deeply moving and explores one of the major themes that I love seeing in cinema. (Perhaps I’ll write a post about that one day, too.) But if I had seen that trailer, I think even the promise of Jake Gyllenhaal’s piercing blue eyes wouldn’t have been enough.

These are just a few examples, but I’m certain you thought of a few more of your own while you were reading. The differences in tone and often misleading narratives are unfortunately an unavoidable result of the process of building a trailer. The only fix that immediately comes to mind is for the director or screenwriter to at least script the trailer, if not to edit it himself. However, trailers are outsourced for a reason: the rest of the creative team is simply too busy, even in the relative calm of post production. I wish there were something to be done. So many wonderful films get buried in the annals of cinema history because of a poor trailer. As a filmmaker, it’s scary to think that something I create might be wonderful but fail miserably because of something totally outside of my control.

And it’s not like we can just stop making trailers, either. A large percentage of trailers (I don’t want to say “most”) accurately capture the tone and plot. It’s just that the mismatches stick out to us, so they’re the ones we tend to think of. Plus, they’re useful insofar as telling the general public of what movies are coming out and when. In a word, they’re informative.

We’re never going to be able to get away from them, but it’s hard to be generous when some of my favorite movies have completely bombed due to bad marketing. I wish there were a way to make bad trailers illegal. Every time I see a good trailer for a bad movie, I can’t help but shout “Where were you when 47 Ronin needed you?!” And every time I see the terrible trailers that have been made for movies I love, I cringe and my thoughts start spinning in directions of defamation lawsuits. Or at least false advertising, honestly.

Yet, at the same time, I can’t deny that watching the trailers in the theater before a movie starts is almost as much fun as watching the movie. So I guess we’ll all have to cringe and yell to ourselves, and launch our own personal ad campaigns for really great films with our friends. After all, cult classics are still “classics.”