David Pogue wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the marketing of National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Masked as something of an ad for the Internet Movie Database, the article dissects the movie’s trailers, telling us about the many clips that aren’t actually in the cut we see at the theater. Is this a form of false advertising? Pogue wonders how far Hollywood can take this type of manipulation:
Rearranging scenes in the trailer is one thing. But what about this business of putting stuff in the trailer — a *lot* of stuff — that isn???t in the movie at all? If they can get away with ???National Treasure???-style misrepresentation, what???s to stop other moviemakers from putting special effects, witty lines, exotic locales and hot-looking actors into *their* trailers, just to get us to go to a movie that doesn???t have any of those things?
Well, that’s exactly what Justin Lin’s Annapolis did a couple years back. As you can see from the trailer above, the movie promises many scenes involving aircraft carriers and other Naval ships, as well as flying jets, all that could be expected to be in exciting action sequences. Yet Annapolis never really expands its story beyond the U.S. Naval Academy, and so anyone looking for that action movie must have been disappointed.
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