I’ve never seen a movie so completely and totally fucked by its trailer. It’s rare these days that movie trailers don’t spoil important plot points, if not give away the entire movie. An even worse sin is to spin a movie to appear as something it’s not. Before we go any further, watch the trailer:
The very first scene in the trailer is the most action-packed moment of the entire movie, and then the rest of the trailer is full of all the action moments from the movie, with an awkward emphasis on the motorcycle, and they when they ran out of action shots to show, they just repeat the opening scene of the trailer again.
I tend to check IMDb after watching a movie, and I fully expected this movie to be in solid 7/10 territory and was shocked to find it in 5/10 territory. Since this is an objectively good movie on many levels, I was so confused. After digging in more, I figured out what happened.
People who went in expecting to see a zombie action-horror movie were met with a slow family drama, something more like Marvin’s Room. I can only imagine the confusion, disappointment, maybe even feeling cheated or deceived. And honestly, audiences really were tricked.
The entire trailer was designed to sell tickets, not represent what the film actually is, and so it was doomed before anyone ever even sat down in a theater to watch it. This highlights better than anything the conflict between business and art.
Zak Hilditch knew exactly what kind of film he was making:
“The theme is what I was hanging on to with unfinished business and grief, and that helped me get through all of that, because as long as I was being truthful to that, it was allowing me this unique look at zombies in a way I’d never seen on screen before.“
He made the movie he wanted to make and he executed it extremely well. The studio correctly assumed that general audiences would find it boring, so rather than trying to sell the movie honestly, they just made it look like a different movie entirely.
They promoted a movie to people they calculated would get the best returns, and now it’s the director who suffers the consequences of low ratings, not from people who thought it was a bad movie on merit, but because they got a different movie from what they were promised.
Even if the movie was marketed correctly, of course there would have been people that still didn’t like it, but setting the right expectations has a stronger psychological effect than is often accounted for when trying to understand why people liked or disliked something.
If the trailer had been honest, it would have attracted people who like slow dramas in the first place and people who hate them would have skipped it. Maybe it wouldn’t have sold as well upfront, but it would have received more accurate ratings.
It’s a damn shame, but I think this movie will be one of those movies that did poorly at the time, but that people consider a great, classic film in retrospect. Never forget, people hated Blade Runner when it first came out.
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