What are some of the most successful flim-flam movie marketing campaigns of all time? Ad and trailer campaigns, I mean, in which the content of a certain film was almost completely hidden and/or ignored, and the marketing guys sold a film that didn’t really exist — at least not in the way it was represented by the one-sheets and trailers. A marketing campaign, in short, that didn’t exaggerate this or that aspect of a film (which all movie campaigns do) as much as one that pretty much deliberately lied about what a film actually was.

And got away with it, I mean — that’s the important part. People showed up and then realized ten of fifteen minutes into the film that they’d been hoodwinked by the ad guys, but they stayed anyway and liked the film and came out and told their friends to go see it. Normally I’d come up with two or three examples to start things off, but let’s just toss it out and see where this goes. And if you can’t think of any strong examples, name some films that maybe should have used a deceptive marketing approach — i.e., films that suffered from an overly sincere and truthful campaign.

An oldie but goodie to start things off…fake, of course, but a satiric example of what a fair number of campaigns have done or tried to do. Successfully, I mean.