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Bad marketing can take on a myriad of ugly forms. Misleading trailers are one of the leading causes of bad marketing. Other options include trying to borrow the fame that the whole genre is enjoying, or the worst alternative, which is not marketing the movie at all.
Updated May 17, 2022, by Kristy Ambrose: Bad marketing has been around for as long as movies have, so it’s easy to go through the streaming services or “Now Playing” lists and pick a few more movies that missed the mark when it came to publicity. Thankfully, however, modern audiences at least have the advantage of enjoying these movies without the messed-up marketing campaigns that buried them in the first place.
12 The Last Action Hero (1993)
This movie gets some poor reviews, but that’s only because people don’t know if it’s a real action movie or a parody of action movies. The Last Action Hero is intended as a fun parody and is great on that level, but the marketing department put too much focus on the previous work of star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was known for gritty action movies.
The result was a confusing marketing campaign that wanted to have it both ways. There was some publicity about everyone’s favorite action hero kicking ass again, but the reality was that it was a kid-friendly action flick with some smart quips but much less blood and gore.
11 Unbreakable (2000)
This is the first installment in the Unbreakable series and is considered to be a thriller. However, this movie was M. Night Shyamalan’s next directorial offering since the Sixth Sense, which was a straight-up horror movie.
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Someone in the marketing department thought it would be brilliant to sell it as a horror movie just for brand recognition, and as a result, a lot of people who saw Unbreakable felt they had been misled. Luckily, viewers and critics eventually saw past the bad publicity to recognize Unbreakable as deserving of acclaim despite the mistakes taking it public.
10 In Bruges (2008)
In Bruges was marketed like another Layer Cake or Snatch, with this genre of gritty crime drama laced with British accents enjoying a surge of popularity at the time. In Bruges is really more of a comedy than a crime thriller, so people that went to see some tense cops and robbers action were sorely disappointed, even though it’s a great comedy.
Most of the fans of this movie stumbled onto it by accident while looking for a type of mafia drama. Granted, the plot of two hitmen who retreat to an ancient European city to hide after a job goes bad sounds like a typical thriller, but this one takes a few brilliant but silly turns and is definitely not serious.
9 Bicentennial Man (1999)
Robin Williams took some amazing dramatic roles during the course of his career, and Bicentennial Man was one example. Unfortunately, that was where the public relations campaign for this movie went wrong. It was marketed as a comedy because that’s how the public knows Williams, which was misleading since this is definitely a sci-fi drama.
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The title refers to the life expectancy of the protagonist, which is 200 years, longer than the average human being. Bicentennial Man includes some heavy issues in its storyline, including the nature of humanity, conformity, sexuality, and mortality, although ironically, most critics said that the dialogue wasn’t serious enough in this regard.
8 Drive (2011)
The Fast and Furious franchise started in 2001 and was still going strong ten years later when Drive was released. This was part of the reason it was marketed as a movie about a cool car and an even cooler driver even though it’s a much more complex crime-noir drama. Critics and fans eventually saw past the bad marketing and recognized a great movie.
The main character is a Hollywood stuntman and a mechanic who also works as a getaway driver for less savory characters. He’s always known simply by the nickname “the Driver” but he doesn’t even drive that much through the course of the movie. The story is really about how his unstable life gets even more dangerous when he helps a neighbor get out of an abusive relationship, not about his car or his driving.
7 End Of Watch (2012)
This movie is ten years old, but that’s not why many people have never heard of it. This realistic drama might have been lost in a sea of buddy-cop flicks or cheap reality TV copycat shows and was never widely viewed in its time.
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The semi-documentary tone and lack of any hyperbolic drama make it awkward to even find this movie’s target audience. End of Watch suffered from a lack of publicity as opposed to flat-out bad marketing and never made it out of obscurity, despite its quality.
6 Kangaroo Jack (2003)
There’s a good movie in here somewhere, and it seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor. Kangaroo Jack started out as a raunchy R-rated comedy movie, as many of the mature jokes and toilet humor remain, but someone in marketing decided to make it a PG.
This was no doubt to reach a larger and therefore more lucrative audience, but the result was a movie that nobody liked. Even kids who thought they would be watching a cute talking kangaroo were bitterly disappointed. The critter only appears occasionally and says nothing at all, and the heroes first encounter him when they think it’s roadkill.
5 Contagion (2011)
Everyone loves movies with an apocalyptic twist, which is why Contagion was marketed as one. The movie is definitely part of the genre and has a chilling story along with some action sequences, but it’s really more of a documentary or episodic style of storytelling.
Watching this movie now, which was based on the SARS epidemic, it’s interesting how so much of this has come to pass since COVID-19 turned the world upside-down. The marketing then was awkward, but the public’s view has changed, and this movie enjoyed a surge of popularity in 2019 and 2020.
4 Cry Baby (1990)
Cry Baby is a John Waters flick, so people should have known what to expect. The 1990s saw a resurgence of the musical Grease and this movie was intended to parody the clean-cut, nostalgic look of those cool kids of the Atomic Age.
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The problem is that the marketing team didn’t express clearly enough that this was intended as a satire of a genre, not a serious musical drama. The movie had some tonal problems that didn’t help, but marketing Cry Baby as a serious movie when it wasn’t only added to the confusion.
3 Gattaca (1997)
This movie was marketed as a drama about an ultra-futuristic world with a romantic thriller in the background, and although Gattaca did contain those elements, that portrayal was far from accurate. Movies with big-budget special effects were hot at the time, which explains this poor marketing choice.
The plot was loosely based on books like Brave New World, which describe a future in which every single human being has their life mapped out from birth depending on their DNA. The movie’s intent wasn’t to show off a lot of special effects or nifty gadgets but to explore the social implications of this kind of society. Visually, it is still a gorgeous movie with some great casting and does have a lot of merits.
2 The Cable Guy (1996)
A black comedy written by Ben Stiller and starring names like Jack Black and Jim Carey, it was the timing of the movie and the sudden popularity of one of the lead actors that led to some misleading marketing. The PR department leaned on the wacky comedy personality of Jim Carey in the leading role even though his character was intended to be taken more seriously, and the audience didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not.
The Cable Guy actually had a decent box office return, but because it grossed less than other movies released in the same time period, it was considered a failure by comparison. These days though, it does have a cult following and is considered a classic by many.
1 21 Jump Street (2012)
The marketing team behind the publicity for 21 Jump Street relied too much on the nostalgia factor alone rather than advertise the stars and their comic prowess. Perhaps they were being modest or wanted to keep the comedic angle of the movie under wraps, afraid that too many changes would anger fans of the original show.
Either way, the marketing for this movie barely did more than reference the vintage TV show and didn’t give the actors or writers the credit they deserved for making it one of the funniest movies of the year and a sleeper hit.
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