Has anyone else noticed this? One of the trailers I have seen tries to depict this as a smart comedy aimed at an older audience and another seems to make it out to be a lower brow comedy. I haven't ever noticed this with any other movies.
shareActually a lot of studios will do this. It has to do with what channel and at what time the preview is being shown. The idea is to draw more people into the theaters. For this movie I'm sure during prime time, the news, and things like that the previews will be more high brow and show more of Steve Martin to try to draw people who are fans of his movies. Channels like Spike and such will show the low brow humor and more of Black and Wilson to draw in their usual demographic. I don't have cable anymore so I can't tell you any recent movies that do this but I remember when the movie The Golden Compass came out the first previews focused on the talking animals and stuff to try to entice kids. When the Catholic church started to protest the film and stuff the previews showed more battle scenes to focus more on the older crowds to appease the church and other family groups that had a problem with the film.
Dr. Cox: The point is... Newbie is my drunk baby.
I only saw one trailer, but it was definitely misleading. The trailer I saw made it look like a goofy, buddy comedy, sort of like a Bucket List, with a younger cast, and I had ZERO interest in seeing it. In fact, I only saw it because my friends and I were too late to see the movie we wanted to watch, but couldn't wait too long, 'cause we had dinner reservations, and The Big Year was the only movie that fit. It's more of an exploration of birding culture, something about which I was completely ignorant, than it is a screwball comedy. I certainly wouldn't call it a great movie - too many of the jokes fell flat, which is a shame, 'cause all three leads are great comic actors (even though they've all fallen from grace a bit in the past few years). However, it wasn't bad. Definitely better than I expected, and a much different movie than the trailer led me to believe.
Also, I saw it at 5:00 PM on a Saturday on opening weekend, and there were about 10 people in the theater. Don't think this one will be around that long.