Trailers can be deceiving, generic, or exciting, and sometimes, they can be complete superhero genre, there is a massive source to mine from for examples of such blunders. While the art of advertising can be a delicate process, and sometimes the effectiveness can be subjective, here are 10 absolute disastrous trailers for superhero films.
X-Men
There will be a few dreadful 2000s trailers on this list. The X-Men trailer is pretty corny. There are tons of title cards for each and every mutant in the film, feeling more like a Mortal Kombat run-through than a movie. The best part is when Rogue pops up, and the trailer doesn't have cool action shots to show off, as her power isn't that visual, so they just throw together a quick succession of her gasping at touching people. It feels more like a trailer for a 1990s videogame than a movie.
Batman (1989)
The trailer for Tim Burton's Batman doesn't become coherent until the very final shots. Before that point, it is a mess of some of the worst editing in a trailer to be found anywhere.
The sound levels are all over the place, the music cuts in and out, and it feels like random scenes were just cut and paste into the film. Thankfully, the very final moments play the iconic theme and have Batman do his brooding thing and Joker do his laugh, but it's a disaster beforehand.
Catwoman
The Catwoman trailer is actually a sort of beautiful gem. It's simply horrendous. It looks more like a sort of pornographic parody of Catwoman than an actual movie. Every shot constantly sexes up Halle Berry, the trailer showcases the worst-looking CGI shots imaginable, and there are incredibly cheesy title cards blasting unmemorable expressions to generic 2000s trailer music.
Fant4stic
The trailer for Fant4stic summed up the film itself with its first line, "We gave you six years and millions of dollars, and you gave us nothing." The trailer goes out of its way to make the Fantastic Four, one of the lighter-tone Marvel properties, into serious, brooding, badass gritty superheroes.
It also framed the movie more as a science-fiction film than a superhero film. The trailer did nothing to intrigue audiences into coming and paying a ticket instead of going to MCU films.
Daredevil
Just like the movie itself, the trailer for Daredevil is a mess. It has the cheesy voice-over narration, vaguely Matrix sounding music in the background and slow-mo to cash in on the hype, and yes, "Let The Bodies Hit The Floor" plays for a few seconds for no reason. It has incredibly rapid and disorienting editing, and constant "trailer lines" squeezed in. The trailer had no sense of what tone or style to stay with, and every 30 seconds, it feels like a different video for the same movie.
The Avengers
This trailer is akin to many of the early 2000s trailers on this list. It's simply underwhelming. For the movie that was coming together for years, it's a shame the trailer was so subpar. There's edgy music, vague editing, and quippy one-liners being spoiled. For a movie universe that was so good because it did everything right that the early pre-MCU Marvel movies did wrong, this trailer learned nothing.
Batman v. Superman
This has the unique distinguishment of being both better than the film itself and also harming it. The second trailer for Batman v. Superman is the one in focus here. It's pretty filled with spoilers; Doomsday is shown, Wonder Woman's entrance, and too much footage of the "Knightmare" sequence. For a movie hyping up "versus" in the title, it was a bad idea to show the duo as friends by the finale.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix
To be fair to the trailer, the movie was incredibly forgettable, so if anything, the trailer was pretty honest as to what audiences were in store for. It was also painfully obvious that Mystique was a goner, as she only appeared in certain parts of the trailer and not others, along with a shot of a funeral. And likewise, it was obvious that Quicksilver was not going to be playing a big role (as he had to be nerfed). It was a predictable trailer for a predictable movie. It held back nothing, because no one really cared about the film anyway, since the X-Men were recently acquired by Marvel Studios, and the Fox story had long become convoluted...and got a better sendoff with Logan.
Venom
The advertising coming out of Sony is often fascinatingly incompetent. Every year, they manage to release the worst teasers and trailers, design the worst posters, and anger audiences in some way. The teaser trailer for Venom was one of their biggest blunders. A lifeless and shallow trailer that didn't show the titular character and essentially made Venom look like another Fant4stic. After listening to the negative , Sony released another trailer, showing off Venom himself a bit more. But then, to even further drive the point home, they released a third trailer that showed too much, including the final shot of the film.
Spider-Man: Far From Home
Once again, Sony held their title of "worst advertising process" when they released the trailer for Avengers: Endgame had come out, undermining all of the secrecy that Marvel had put into Endgame. While the trailer itself is fine, the real crime is spoiling what would become the highest-grossing film in history. Then, to be even worse, Sony released another trailer while Endgame was in theaters that further spoiled one of the biggest scenes in the film, and justified doing so by opening with Tom Holland warning audiences watching that it would spoil Endgame. There was no need to even include the spoilers in the trailer whatsoever.
