Epic Trailers That Were Wasted On The Worst Movies

In an era of unnecessary sequels, it's a surprise "Zoolander 2" took so long. Fifteen years after the first installment morphed from box office bomb to cult comedy classic, audiences were ready to see Blue Steel flash across the screen again. Then the trailer dropped, and it was great: All of our favorite characters were back, Benedict Cumberbatch looked like an androgynous alien (possibly his true form), Mugatu's hair was looking fresh as ever and we even got to see Justin Bieber get assassinated, a dark fantasy of more than a few people who survived the Bieber era. This was the triumphant return of early 2000s nostalgia. With 21 million views (more than the population of Romania) and 82,000 likes on YouTube, the world was clearly ready.

And then we saw the movie. It was ... okay? There wasn't much to laugh at, and the movie just rode on a wave of nostalgia, only offering twists on the same jokes from the first movie. Honestly, we should have known when, in the trailer, we saw Mugatu throw coffee on his assistant again. Everybody in the movie looked bored, just going through the motions, and no amount of Justin Bieber cameos could save it. Even the Magnum look couldn't stop the bad reviews. Everybody forgot they saw the movie within a week, sending any hope of further sequels up in flames faster than a freak gasoline fight accident.

Whaling doesn't top many lists of "Things I Want To See in Movies," but "In the Heart of the Sea" looked like it was ready to change that for us. This trailer had everything: beautiful cinematography (look at those vistas!), cool special effects shots without revealing the monster, and Thor looking badass holding a spear! What's not to love? The trailer was so good that four million people watched it — many of whom never even knew they wanted to see a whaling movie.

Turns out, the only good things about the movie were in the trailer. Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson are talented actors. Ron Howard is a competent director, and knows how to put together an interesting story. But it never connected with the audience on an emotional level. Most of the movie was just characters yelling at each other — and since none of the characters were fully developed, "In the Heart of the Sea" was ultimately just a slog. All it did was prove that not even Chris Hemsworth's rippling muscles and sexy hair can save a bland script — something we should have already known from "Thor: The Dark World."

Look away, DC fans, because we're just going to say it: "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" was terrible. The movie was an utter mess, feeling like a bunch of people randomly mixed multiple scripts into one movie. Character motivations were unclear, acting was subpar, and the dialogue was laughable. Worst of all, it was utterly forgettable. Well, except for Batman and Superman bonding over the names of their mothers. Nobody will forget that.

We have to hand it to DC, though: the trailer for "Batman v Superman" is super rad, and it pulled in 53 million views and 306,143 upvotes. (Many of its dislikes came after the movie was released.) It's easy to see why people loved this trailer: Batman looks awesome, and seeing him ready to fight Supes made everybody giddy. The voiceovers paint a chilling and realistic picture of how the human race would actually react if Superman lived among them. We wouldn't just hold hands and love our alien savior — many people would be terrified. 

Sadly, even though that was technically a theme of the movie, the light-and-punching show overshadowed everything else. Zack Snyder has an eye for storyboard design, and that makes for great trailers. Solid films, on the other hand, are a completely different story.

If we were to draw up a list of ingredients for a cool movie, you'd find most of them in the trailer for "Sucker Punch." World War I dogfights, dragons, machine guns, trench warfare, B-25 bombers, attractive girls fighting with guns, zeppelin crashes — this clip has it all. Why was that bomber plane fighting a dragon? Who cares? It looks cool.

In the days before DC movies, having Zack Snyder's name attached to a project actually helped build up hype. After the success of "300," we were ready to see Snyder step into a gritty, more modern world, and if its trailer was anything to go by, "Sucker Punch" stood poised to redefine the action genre by bringing steampunk into the mainstream.

Nope. With a budget of $82 million, "Sucker Punch" failed to even earn back half of the studio's investment domestically (although it made up much of the difference overseas). Scathing reviews and accusations of sexism poisoned the well early on, and nobody ended up seeing it. Snyder's next gig? Directing "Man of Steel." Why Warner Bros. watched him botch "Sucker Punch" and then hired him to start the DC Cinematic Universe remains a huge mystery, but you can't say they didn't know what they were getting.

What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

When it comes to M. Night Shyamalan, the whole world is insane. We keep giving this hack director chances! He cranked out junk for a solid decade after "Signs," but for some reason, we kept thinking he'd turn it around and redeem his career. (He seemed to do that with "The Visit" and "Split," but more recently, "Old" and "Knock at the Cabin" have made us cautious again.)

"The Last Airbender" seemed like the movie to save Shyamalan. Literally all he had to do was adapt the story of a hit franchise, write semi-competent dialogue and ride the brand-recognition gravy train all the way to the bank. This was a slam dunk, and the trailer tricked us into thinking he'd score. The trailer had all the elements that we loved from the cartoon show, faithfully adapted to live action. It actually looked good. This movie was highly anticipated — and it bombed.

At 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, this is the lowest-rated Shyamalan film, and that includes "The Happening," the movie where trees were the villains. His utter inability to turn even a surefire success into a hit suggested irrefutable evidence that Shyamalan would never make a good movie again. While that's been proven somewhat wrong, we're not ready to trust you again, M. Night.

Out of all the Zack Snyder movie trailers on our list, this one hurts the most. The third trailer for "Man of Steel" might be the best ever made: it's perfect. Starting with slow piano music, the trailer pulls at our heartstrings, fills us with wonder, and is more tearjerking than a commercial for a movie has any right to be.

Anybody who doesn't feel chills when Superman launches into the air needs to check their pulse. The music perfectly builds to the moment and the immaculate editing drives the trailer to its thrilling climax. Really, it's a mini-movie. Too bad the full film never lived up to it.

Instead of an epic and inspiring Superman, we got one who moped around for most of the story. Plot holes wrecked the script, and the climactic 45-minute fight scene was so loud and terribly edited that it was impossible to walk away from "Man of Steel" feeling satisfied. After all that pent-up demand and anticipation, it started the DC cinematic universe off with a whimper, not a bang.

Still, the trailer exists, and it's worth watching again. In fact, we still like to imagine that "Man of Steel" never came out, and this is for a better Superman movie still in production. Please, DC, give us something as good as this three-minute short.

Nicholas Winding Refn films lend themselves to misleading trailers. The trailer for "Drive" actually became the subject of a false advertising lawsuit from a woman expecting a "Fast and Furious"-style action movie instead of a slow atmospheric drama, but that 2011 movie went on to become a favorite of critics and film fans alike. Not so with "Only God Forgives," Refn's 2013 follow-up collaboration with actor Ryan Gosling.

Where "Drive" won Refn a Best Director award at Cannes, "Only God Forgives" was greeted with boos at the same festival two years later. From the trailer, "Only God Forgives" looked like an awesome martial arts movie. The actual film made "Drive" look like a non-stop thrill ride in comparison, heightening everything that made its predecessor alienating to the mainstream (the long stretches of silence, the sporadic bursts of extreme violence) without the appealing story and solid emotional core that gave "Drive" its cult status. "Style over substance doesn't really tell the half of it," wrote Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "You can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won't go away."

Ben Stiller's 2013 adaptation of James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is the epitome of failed Oscar bait. Coming off directing 2008's "Tropic Thunder," a wild satire of awards season that managed to get actual awards nominations for star Robert Downey Jr., "Walter Mitty" seemed like a move into something more serious and inspirational while still maintaining an element of humor.

The film's first trailer, set to the song "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men, made it look like Stiller was going to pull it off. Starting off with Walter Mitty's mundane routine of going to work at Life magazine, the trailer soon transforms into a surreal and epic adventure, with the images on the magazines' covers coming to life. It's a beautiful trailer.

While the movie itself was just as visually stunning as promised, the storytelling ultimately proved unsatisfying and mawkish. Bilge Ebiri's review for Vulture proclaimed, "Exquisitely produced, immaculately acted, and thoroughly uninvolving, 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' is a perfect nothing of a movie." Marc Mohan of The Oregonian felt similarly: "The movie is beautifully shot ... but it's also a blatantly manipulative piece of smarm." This was not the awards season behemoth it was set up to be.

Long before movie lovers were sick of Disney churning out live-action remakes of all of its animated classics, the idea of a Tim Burton-directed "Alice in Wonderland" movie sounded potentially wonderful. Burton is at his best when he's able to let loose with strange imagery, and Lewis Carroll's classic children's books would seem like the ideal playground to indulge his creativity without worrying about his relative weaknesses in conventional plotting.

So of course the 2010 "Alice in Wonderland" looked awesome in its trailers, which highlighted the expectedly impressive production design and special effects. Despite these visual strengths, however, the actual movie went against the spirit of its source material by turning it into a painfully generic "chosen one" narrative. Basically everything that was appealing about the movie was showcased in the marketing, and all that was left for surprises in the theater were such unappealing sights as the Mad Hatter's "futterwacken" dance.

"Wonder Woman 1984" was one of the most highly anticipated movies of 2020, and ended up being arguably one of its worst, certainly one of its most disappointing. The trailer did an excellent job selling the movie, combining the girl power action that made Patty Jenkins' 2017 "Wonder Woman" so refreshing with a new, colorful and nostalgic 1980s setting and style. How could you not get hyped up by that remix of "Blue Monday" from New Order?

Not having to reveal the film's more questionable plot elements makes everything look better than it was. When the new villain Max Lord (Pedro Pascal) talks on TV about getting everything you want, you might think you're in for a commentary on the excesses of '80s capitalism rather than a silly "Dreamstone" plot line. When the trailer shows Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back from the dead and reuniting with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), you wouldn't even guess that their romance would involve violating a total stranger's consent. But yes, that's actually in the film.

The most entertaining thing to come out of 2017's "The Mummy," Universal's failed attempt at kickstarting a "Dark Universe" of monster movies, wasn't supposed to be released. By accident, the IMAX trailer for Alex Kurtzman's film was released with large chunks of it missing music or most sound effects. The result is simply hilarious.

How could you not love the pilot's weak grunt as a swarm of birds silently break through the window of the plane? Is there anything more amusing than Tom Cruise and company screaming while being flipped around the crashing plane? Even if the movie turned out well, it would still struggle to match the entertainment value of this borderline-experimental "so bad it's good" trailer.

This version of "The Mummy" was not good. Lacking both the gothic chills of the 1932 version and the campy adventure of the 1999 update, this "Mummy" failed with both critics and general audiences. Today, it serves as a cautionary tale for any producers so desperate to build a cinematic universe that they forget you need a movie people will actually want to see more of.