How to Tell When a Movie Trailer Is Lying, From Infinity War's Hulk Shot to the Yesterday Lawsuit

Some trailers lie to protect a movie, and some lie to hide a studio's doubts. The lie is most likely to sit in the final hero shot of a film's very first teaser. Remember the Hulk's jungle run in the Infinity War trailer? Hollywood used shots like that to sell tickets, and when we showed up expecting to see them on the big screen, they were gone. In this piece I want to investigate why that happens and how to tell when a trailer is lying.

I love movie trailers, and I have analysed hundreds of them. Trailers have evolved from simple sales pitches into the first peak of a narrative roller coaster that lasts months of our lives. We now expect a trailer to be a transparent promise of a movie's premise and spectacle, one that doesn't spoil too much of the plot and works artistically as a short film in its own right. But like all advertising, trailers use deception.

Trailer deception comes in four types, and Morbius broke the trust

Last year I broke down the four types of trailer deception. The first is when a shot intended to be in the movie ends up deleted from the final cut during post production. The second is when trailer shots are altered with effects to prevent spoilers. The third is when shots are presented out of context to create tonal misdirection. The fourth is when studios use glamour shots that were never actually intended to be in the final cut in order to entice audiences.

That fourth type was the case with the shot of Iron Man and Spider-Man gliding side by side in a trailer for 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming. It was never planned to be in the movie. But I concluded that as long as the movie on the whole delivers on the promise, a bit of deception is justified. In this case, Peter and Tony's relationship was the heart of Homecoming.

Then in 2022, Morbius burned all of that trust to the ground. Its trailers promised crossovers with Spider-Man and Spider-Man villains, but those shots and scenes were removed from the film, until a mere Spider-Man mention was awkwardly jammed into the movie's post-credits scene. Morbius wasn't alone. Moviegoers have increasingly felt similar whiplash with films like Thor: Love and Thunder, whose trailers promised a killing spree from Gorr the God Butcher. Director Taika Waititi removed Gorr's murder scenes and relegated the villain to a comedic kidnapping plot.

A federal judge let a false advertising lawsuit over Yesterday move forward

Now a federal judge has permitted a false advertising lawsuit to move forward. The plaintiffs are suing Universal over the 2019 Beatles movie Yesterday, after its trailers showed Ana de Armas before the director cut her storyline.

So here is the truth I think we should keep in mind whenever we see a trailer: "all trailers lie." Faithful trailers lie to make our filmgoing experience more authentic, and dishonest trailers lie to hide uncertainties the studio has about the project. Good trailers are like magicians who use misdirection to make you feel rewarded at the end of the show. Bad trailers are like three card Monte scam artists who use misdirection to steal your 20 bucks.

So how do we know if investing our time and money into a movie will be worth it? To make those smart decisions for ourselves, we really must know how trailers have evolved over time, how they're crafted, and the competing ways studios and audiences think about them.

Trailers got their name because they once played after the movie

The practice of exhibiting trailers started in 1913, when a cinema advertising manager produced a short film for the Marcus Loew theatre chain promoting a Broadway musical called The Pleasure Seekers. In 1914 he did the same for a Charlie Chaplin film, and we were off to the races. These promos played after the main feature, trailing it, which is why they were called trailers. The problem was that audiences often left when the movie ended, so theatre managers started rolling them before the main feature. The name stuck anyway.

In the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick reconceived the process after seeing a Canadian short film called Very Nice, Very Nice. He cut a trailer for Dr. Strangelove in a similar fast paced montage style, and that completely changed the game. Trailers began using suspenseful narration and scoring, like the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Universal's 1993 teaser for Jurassic Park didn't include any material from the movie whatsoever, just narration about a piece of amber containing a fossilised prehistoric mosquito.

I grew up in the 1990s, when it seemed like every trailer was narrated by Don LaFontaine. That lasted until 1998, when a trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was so popular that fans would buy tickets to Meet Joe Black and leave right after the Star Wars trailer played. That trailer was simply a montage of film shots, John Williams' score and text, and it has more or less been the popular format since. But it also created an expectation that for genre movies and major franchises like Star Wars, what we see in the trailer will be what we see in the final movie, inviting more and more fan scrutiny.

Meanwhile, an art house style of trailer editing grew in popularity through editors like Mark Woollen, who cut the trailer for the 2006 film Little Children to the sounds of a coming train. He also edited the amazing trailer for 2010's The Social Network, using a Belgian girls' choir covering Radiohead's Creep over close ups of the Facebook website. What's interesting is that neither the song nor those shots were used anywhere in the film.

A teaser is the dream you had about the movie

Nowadays trailers tend to be montages of film shots cut to some iconic song. Many of the big ones, including ones I've broken down, have been edited by people like an editor in Disney's promotion department who worked on the teasers for Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Shang-Chi, Eternals and The Mandalorian. I really love something he told Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin on their podcast about his approach to teasers, which he described as mood building: "if you watched a movie and then you fell asleep and you had a dream about it the trailer is the dream you had."

He draws an important distinction between the teaser phase and the trailer phase of a film's marketing life cycle. Four to five months before release comes the teaser, which introduces the tone, the theme and the principal characters, but is mostly about making an impression. Two to three months before release comes the official trailer, which reveals more of the world and the plot and appeals to the four quadrants, meaning men and women under and over 25.

About six weeks to one month before release comes the tickets on sale trailer, which really showcases the movie's fireworks, because it has to make the sales pitch that the movie will be worth your money. That kicks off a final month countdown of weekly and daily promos and TV spots, which often include some spoilers.

Marvel locks its films late, and a late production decision cut the Hulk run

There's an old Hollywood saying that a film is written three times: on the page, again as you shoot it on set, and one final time as you edit it. Sometimes people add a fourth, when a movie is cast. Rewriting a movie in the edit is especially true for Marvel Studios, which is known for taking its films through several rounds of reshoots, with the final version only locked in during the final weeks of post production.

The post-credits scene for 2012's Avengers was shot just a week before release, after the movie's official Hollywood premiere. By then Chris Evans had started growing a beard for his next role in Snowpiercer, which is why you can see him covering his face in that shot. So often, material shown in early teasers later changes or is removed from the final cut.

That was definitely the case with the infamous Hulk running shot in the Infinity War trailer. The producers intended Bruce to Hulk out in the film's final battle, but late in production they decided a successful Hulk out would have been too much of a victory for the movie's downer ending. That gives us a decent barometer: the very first teaser is more of a thematic suggestion than a shot for shot promise. That's not to say teasers are worth ignoring. Everything in them is part of the creative team's vision, and I think the shots that get cut give us a rare look into how difficult and sacrificial filmmaking is.

The act three hero shot is where misdirection is likeliest

We also need to think about where in a single trailer deception tends to occur. Trailers follow their own three act structure: act one sets up the context and tone, act two showcases spectacle, and act three teases the conflict. So the story of every trailer is a hero enters an unfamiliar place and faces a threat, but it's not what you think. That third act, especially in early teasers, is where according to my research misdirection is likeliest to occur, because trailers are edited to leave fans on a cliffhanger designed to generate as much buzz as possible.

I call this the hero shot, and it usually comes right before or right after the final title. The Hulk and Avengers running shot was at the end of the first Infinity War teaser. The second Infinity War trailer ended with Cap holding back Thanos, but the effects artists scrubbed two of the Infinity Stones out of the gauntlet to keep it a mystery how many Thanos would acquire. The Spider-Man and Iron Man shot was at the end of the first Homecoming teaser. The second Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer ended with Peter swinging across the Statue of Liberty, with the other two Peters scrubbed out.

The teaser and trailer for Rogue One both ended with hero shots that were removed when the movie's third act was reworked late in production. And in the Morbius teaser, the Spider-Man graffiti and Michael Keaton's cameo came in the final section. Most of the time, when hero shots change between trailer and release, it's done to excite us for the heroics of a scene while pulling the character out of a context that might spoil the plot. From the artist's perspective it's for our benefit, like a magician deliberately misdirecting us so the prestige hits harder.

Wakanda Forever's silhouette was a risk that paid off

So when trailers seem to show all their cards in the climactic hero shot, they're often hiding one of two things. Either the movie has the goods and they don't want to spoil them yet, or they're taking a risk and worry that if they show the big reveal out of context you might hate it, hoping the movie will win you over when you see it.

The risk takers aren't always bad or unethical. Take the mystery hero shot at the end of the very first Wakanda Forever teaser. It was a gamble, because Marvel Studios knew fans might have mixed reactions to Shuri being the new Black Panther. So instead we got only a mystery silhouette who could have been anyone at that point: Nakia, Okoye, M'Baku, even a resurrected Killmonger. They manipulated the imaginations they knew we would deploy, and even managed to fulfil the wildness of those expectations by bringing back Killmonger in another way.

The closer to release, the more honest the trailer, but Yesterday challenged that rule in court

When we cross reference the acts of a trailer with a movie's marketing life cycle, the shots most likely to be misleading are the act three hero shots of the earliest teasers. The closer we get to release, the less likely trailer material is dishonest. By then the picture is more likely to be locked, the studio knows what will be in the final version, and the final trailers and promos are the material most likely to circulate on TV and social media, so studios want that marketing closest to the experience fans will have in the theatre.

One challenge to that rule faced major legal consequences. Danny Boyle's 2019 film Yesterday stars Himesh Patel as Jack, a musician who wakes up to realise the world has never heard of The Beatles. Its trailers included a scene of Jack serenading Ana de Armas on a talk show. The scene was cut from the film, yet the shot was still used in a trailer released just three weeks before release. Two moviegoers later sued Universal, claiming false advertising.

It wasn't the first lawsuit of its kind. A Michigan moviegoer sued a distributor over 2011's Drive, claiming its trailers depicted a car chase action film when it was a slower, more violent noir art house film. That case was dismissed. In the Yesterday case, Universal tried to have it thrown out, arguing a trailer is an artistic, expressive work that tells a three minute story and should be considered non commercial speech, even citing the Jurassic Park teaser. U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled against the motion, writing: "Universal is correct that trailers involve some creativity and editorial discretion but this creativity does not outweigh the commercial nature of a trailer." So the case was set to proceed, for now.

In the United States we have broad protections for artistic speech, but they only extend so far to commercial speech, and various states have laws punishing false advertising. Historically, courts have cared more about things like obscenity with Hollywood and have otherwise been reluctant to regulate, many would say because the industry plays nice with the MPAA, which also reviews trailers for audience suitability. In the unlikely event that all rulings went against Universal and were upheld, it would completely change how trailers are made: a studio using a shot in marketing would be required to keep it unaltered in the theatrical cut.

Trailers are a tasting menu, not a cheeseburger

So are films and their trailers art, which implies a more interpretive experience, or transactions with an expectation of exact goods delivered? Studios want audiences to see their work as an eclectic tasting menu presented with a flair of mystery, and many of us hungrily sign up for that. Some moviegoers want a straightforward burger that looks exactly as it does on the menu. If you're the one who just wants a cheeseburger, prepare to be disappointed, because trailers are deceptive by nature, whether studios are hiding their anxieties or masking big twists so we enjoy the story more.

So how do we know when a trailer is lying? That final hero shot of the first teaser: very good chance something's up with it. And how do we know when the deception is worth it? A good rule of thumb in my experience: if it looks like something was taken out of a shot or covered up, they probably have the goods. If it looks like something was put in, or they're showing us way too much, they're probably compensating for something. My advice is don't treat movies like fast food, and savour the mystery.

Should trailers be treated as art or as advertising that has to deliver exactly what it shows?