Advertising can actually mean so much to a viewer’s experience. Let’s face it, a filmmaker has 70-180 minutes to create a tone for the movie and to follow through on that tone. Advertising, or even just movie descriptions, can be a key part of that experience.

I just watched The Woodsman the other night, and it spends a full act pussyfooting around its topic: what it’s like for a convicted pedophile to reintegrate with society after spending years in prison. Kevin Bacon spends the entire first act trying to make friends with people at work, but feeling incredibly guilty for the crime he commits, but the movie doesn’t reveal that crime until after he has sex with a female co-worker. By disclosing the nature of Bacon’s crimes in the blurbs (whether in catalogs, on cases, or even in the Netflix text), the first act changes from “what has Bacon done to be so guilty?” to “when will people find out that he’s a pedo, and what will happen when they do?” By revealing the information early, the director is freed from having to spend precious time laying this information out for the audience before he absolutely needs to.

But, what if the movie is something different than what it is selling? What if the movie’s advertising is selling you on a version of the movie that doesn’t exist. In the past week, two movies have come out that have sold audiences a false bag of goods: Collateral Beauty and Passengers.

Here’s the plot from the now-infamous Official Trailer 2 for Collateral Beauty: Will Smith is a great boss going through an extremely tough grieving process after the loss of his daughter. To deal with the pain, he writes to 3 abstractions – Love, Death, and Time – who come visit him one by one in some kind of cross-over between A Christmas Carol and Meet Joe Black. Eventually, he finally goes to therapy to get help with his problems.

This is the actual plot for Collateral Beauty: Will Smith is a great boss who owns a marketing firm, going through an extremely tough grieving process after the loss of his daughter. He’s been grieving for 3 years, and all he does at work is set up elaborate domino chain reactions around the office and knocks them down. Because he has stopped working, his company is losing accounts and his three closest co-workers want to sell the company out from under him even though he owns a controlling share. Instead, they devise a plan to sell the company out from under him by having him ruled incompetent. How? They hire actors to play Love, Death, and Time, and confront him with it on the streets. The trailer promises some mawkish pseudo-spiritual claptrap, while the movie is about making cynical business deals in the face of tragedy.

Even less happens in the trailer for Passengers, pitching the movie as a rom com where Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence wake up from hibernation on a space ship headed for some far off planet only to find out that there might be something deeply fucked up with the spaceship (maybe it’s haunted!). The actual movie is about a malfunction waking Pratt up, who then spends a year alone hoping for companionship and stalking Jennifer Lawrence before finally waking up her from hybernation so he can have somebody to fuck. Oh, and something is deeply fucked up with the spaceship, but it’s not haunted.

They’re not alone. To advertise this past summer’s Suicide Squad, Warner had one trailer for the movie test extremely well, selling it as a candy colored Hot Topic jaunt of anti-establishment snark. But, the movie most certainly wasn’t that. So, Warner handed the movie to the company that made the advertising, and had them re-edit the movie to more closely fit the trailer. The final result was a mish mosh of taste that few have recovered from.

These examples aren’t intentional bait-and-switch advertising pushes, where the director wants the audience to expect a different movie so they can pull the rug out. These are examples of blatantly false advertising, akin to a black licorice candy being dyed red and wrapped in a strawberry wrapper. You might even like licorice, but you were promised a strawberry one!

Has there ever been any good examples of false advertising? Have any really pissed you off? Have any been pleasant surprises?