Man intends to sue Warner Bros. for misleading Suicide Squad trailer

Here’s an Empire article listing 25 trailers that have scenes in them that weren’t in the film…

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/trailer-scenes-never-made-movie-2/

4 Likes

Has anyone pointed him to every E3 presentation ever yet?

2 Likes

I could imagine being very annoyed if they showed the presence of the character Gambit in a new X-men film but then he wasn’t in it at all, that would be just about misleading enough for me to say “this aint what I paid for guv”, but yeah- it’s a foggy grey area as to what they can get away with and I’d just like it if they didn’t deliberately mislead, only accidentally. If this case succeeds it’ll create a darn messy aftermath.

@daneel

Good find.

1 Like

But why would they? They’d have to shoot those trailer-only scenes anyway, so they wouldn’t be saving any money. Might as well throw 'em in the movie at that point.

Trailer scenes aren’t necessarily omitted from the movie by way of intentional false advertising. As someone pointed out upthread, edits happen after trailers are finalized, by all accounts to an unusually large degree on Suicide Squad. In the champeeenship bout between malice and incompetence, the latter is a better bet.

To entice. I’m sure they’ve got tonnes of extra footage laying round of gunfights and car chases and explosions that look great, already in stock.
I realise (i think) that scenes aren’t omitted for purposes of false advertising, but in the absence of legalities, we’re left to the mercy of marketeers, and let’s face it, those are some of the most untrustworthy people on the planet.
I think I’d rather have legal guidelines.

1 Like

I’ve always found Bill Hicks vastly overrated. Bruce, Carlin, Kinison, Black, they all did the angry rant thing, but Hicks is the only one of them who wasn’t the least bit funny behind it.

And that’s been my opinion since well before I took a job in marketing.

I still want to sue 20th Century Fox for the original Alien3 trailer, the one that proclaimed:
In 1979, we discovered… in space, no one can hear you scream.
In 1992, we will discover… ON EARTH, EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM.

2 Likes

On the flip side, he has actually seen the ‘missing’ scenes. Indeed, he admits to seeing the scenes many times before he went to see the film. All the film company needs to state is that the scenes in the trailers were the scenes in their entirety and they were all released for free ahead of the movie, thus this man did indeed get to see all of them.

I’m not sure he’s supposed to be funny. He just tells it like it is.

Even if it had anything to do with the movie, which it doesn’t, that trailer makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. For one thing, the movie doesn’t take place on Earth. Secondly, if you somehow screamed loudly enough for everyone on Earth to hear you, the shockwave alone would be an extinction level event. Alien parasites would be the least of your worries.

Unless maybe the Xenomorphs were attacking a shortwave radio station?

Anyway, I’ll defend Alien³ as a pretty good movie and a proper end to the arc of the trilogy. Its only real misstep (after summarily executing Hicks and Newt before the opening credits) was dragging out the chase through the lead-smelting tunnels towards the end. That could have been tighter, with a better sense of where everyone was and the path they were corralling the thing into.

I would have liked to see the “wooden space station” version though.

2 Likes

Since when is there any sort of “guarantee” that trailer scenes will be included in the final cut? This whole story should’ve been titled, “Privileged manbaby upset that Hollywood directors did not invite, consume, or carry out his wishes with regard to their movie”.

That depends on who is riding with me…[quote=“Cunk, post:30, topic:83089”]
Sure trailers are deceiving and rarely give you any idea of what a movie will be like but do they often show footage that never appears in the movie?
[/quote]

Anecdotally, I seem to recall that happening more than once. Paging resident subject matter expert, @Donald_Petersen …please pick up the white courtesy phone…

I know, the voiceover is really awful and seriously goofy, looking back on it now. But when I saw this trailer (in front of Batman Returns, if I remember correctly) the idea of seeing an Alien movie set on Earth blew my teenage mind.

The first ten minutes of Alien 3 almost caused a riot in the theater I saw it in, for the blurred-out reasons you mention. People were shouting FUCK THAT! and throwing drinks at the screen. And yeah, the wooden space station would have been kind of awesome.

That happens all the time. A relatively tiny fraction of all the footage that gets shot ends up in the final movie. A surprisingly small fraction of all the footage shot is even considered good enough to “print.” (When we actually shot on film, the takes that were considered to be reasonably close to usable would be “printed” as work prints and sent to the editor. Since printing work print off the negative wasn’t exactly free, there wasn’t a lot of point in printing absolutely everything. Now that nearly everything is shot digitally, there isn’t any added monetary cost in sending every last exposed frame to the editor, except that overwhelming the editor with miles of unusable footage along with the two or three good takes needlessly wastes the editor’s time, so we still typically send only the “circled takes” to the editor. Since the digital equivalent of film–digital storage space, that is–is so cheap, the danger is that a director will shoot ever more footage, exacerbating the problem. Later on, if a director remembers a take that was shot that wasn’t printed for some reason or another, and the director feels that take should be used, the editor can send out for “B-neg” and get that take retrieved from the archived camera footage, which is never thrown out anymore.)

So anyway, there’s bunches and bunches of footage available, and the marketing department needs to make teaser trailers long in advance of a movie’s release… sometimes over a year in advance. So the marketing department’s choices of footage generally don’t have much to do with what the director and editor are actually considering keeping in the final cut. The marketing department just uses the most exciting and compelling footage available at the time the trailer is made, generally with no input whatsoever from the director. Sometimes there will be an imperative to avoid disclosing certain plot spoilers or especially key moneyshots, but these days that kind of restraint seems rare.

Often a trailer will include a shot that everyone at the studio fully expects to end up in the final cut, but then the shot (or even the whole scene it’s contained in) gets cut for time, or for tonal reasons, or just because whoever got final cut (which is very often not the director) decided to take it out.

Happens all the time. Not rare in the least.

ETA: Key example: Harrison Ford’s “Chewie… we’re home” line from The Force Awakens. That scene and line are still in the movie, but a different take was used in the trailer.

5 Likes

I always thought the new world was where the frivolous lawsuit bloomed

1 Like

3 Likes

The podrace was pretty cool.

2 Likes

Holy shit.

This open letter to Kevin Tsujihara is a scorcher.

Do read it.

5 Likes

That would be a silly thing to do because they’d still have to pay just as much to shoot those scenes. The only reason the final cut of the movie occasionally leaves out scenes that appear in the trailers is that the filmmakers felt the movie worked BETTER that way, not worse.

2 Likes

I can’t ever find it online these days (the one I can find is simply not the one I originally saw), but I remember the trailer to Species being a very, very good trailer, that made it look like the movie was going to be amaaaaazing.

That was by far the biggest quality differential between trailer and movie that I have ever seen.

I hope he wins.