Top 10 Trailers That Gave Away the WHOLE Movie

James Bond is back! He’s got a new face, specifically Pierce Brosnan’s. He’s got a new mission that still involves saving the world. And he’s got a new enemy, Sean Bean’s Alec Trevelyan, who starts as Bond’s friend and fellow agent 006. We think Trevelyan dies during the opening sequence. The movie does a good job presenting other potential big bads building up to the reveal just shy of the final act. Of course, all that careful misdirection is irrelevant to anyone who watched the theatrical trailer first. It sets up the film as a battle between Bond and his former friend almost right away. It even shows the sinister Bean emerging from the shadows, leaving the audience seven steps ahead of Bond.

Talk about taking the thrill out of the thriller. This trailer did an excellent job setting up the central mystery of Mark Pellington’s 1999 psychological thriller. Are Michael Faraday's new neighbors really terrorists? Or is Jeff Bridges’ college professor character imagining this due to lingering trauma caused by his FBI agent wife’s death? It’s quite intriguing, right up until they give you the answer, removing any ambiguity. He was right. They’re terrorists. The trailer follows up the big reveal with scenes from the action-heavy final part of the film, which they probably also should have left as a surprise.

“I can’t believe Paul Shepherdson is really Cassius,” is what people leaving this movie would have been saying, had they not already learned that in its trailer. You’d think a retired CIA agent actually being the very assassin he is hunting is a plot point studios would want to keep out of the film’s promotional material, but no. While most of the entries on this list fared well at the box office despite a revelatory trailer, that’s not the case with 2011’s “The Double.” We’re not saying the trailer is the cause, but when a movie with Richard Gere, Topher Grace, and Martin Sheen costs $13 million, but only brings in $4.7 million, it’s fair to wonder.

Giving away key plot points in trailers has been a hallmark of the “Terminator” franchise since 1991. The “Terminator 2” trailer revealed that Arnold’s evil Terminator was now John Connor’s savior. Then the trailer for 2009’s “Salvation” let it slip that Sam Worthington’s character was secretly a Terminator. But the trailer for 2015’s “Terminator Genysis” takes the proverbial cake. It shows that John Connor himself, the leader of the human resistance, is now a human/Terminator hybrid working for SkyNet. Such a major reveal wasn’t necessary to sell the movie. We already get a new T-1000, Daenerys as Sarah Connor, and a hint that this movie will subvert the earlier “Terminator” films. Why show us what specific form the subversion will take?

A group of college students go on a road trip to a remote cabin in the woods. They are attacked by zombies and other creatures. It feels like they are in a horror movie. Really, they’re in a filmed and produced experiment based on horror tropes. Like “The Truman Show,” but with murder. This sounds like an excellent premise for a movie. It also sounds like the kind of movie that would do best to keep the main reveal of the people pulling the strings out of its trailer. “The Cabin in the Woods” doesn’t do that. They had enough horror material to work with, but instead of using that to keep the misdirect alive, they pulled back the curtain a little too soon.

If you search for the “Cast Away” trailer online, you’re likely to find a version that establishes Tom Hanks’ work-focused character Chuck Noland, follows him onto the ill-fated airplane, and ends with him stranded on a desert island. It sets up the premise without giving too much away. If you search a little bit deeper, you’ll stumble on what audiences saw in theaters back in 2000. There are key scenes of Hanks on the island, learning how to survive, and attempting to escape. Most notably, we get a look at him after he is rescued four years later reintegrating into society and rebuilding his now former life. Or, in other words, it’s the whole movie mapped out from start to finish.

This 2000 Robert Zemeckis film is a slow-burn supernatural mystery with ample twists and turns. We discover there is a spirit haunting the Spencer’s quiet lake house. It’s not who Michelle Pfeiffer’s Claire Spencer originally thinks, however. The spirit instead has a connection to Harrison Ford’s Norman Spencer. Then the spirit possesses Claire and Norman realizes just who she is. You can follow the mystery, and discover the secrets at the appropriate dramatic pace. If you don’t have time for that, you can just watch the trailer, which gives everything away, almost beat for beat. At least it doesn’t show the resolution, but that’s all this trailer leaves for the film to reveal.

A good superhero movie trailer lets people know which key characters are involved, what actors are playing them, and what the general premise is. It also shows some, but not too much, of the action. With 2016’s “Batman v Superman,” we already get the superheroes and premise from the title, so showing Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill makes sense. Since this is clearly a Justice League precursor, showing Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman is logical, too. But this movie’s second trailer gave us much more than a glimpse at her, going beat for beat through the film’s main plot points. Given all that, it’s the reveal of Doomsday as a principal antagonist that earned this trailer number three on our list.

This movie has a simple premise. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a permanently unimpressed weatherman who is somehow re-living the same day. If the trailer stuck to that, and offered a few other fun scenes, then it would have done its job. Instead, we get to see the steps Murray’s character takes to escape, embrace, and eventually benefit from his predicament. In order! The trailer doesn’t give away some of the more dramatic moments, but it does show almost all of the comedy and romance, which is an interesting choice, given that this is a romantic comedy. “Groundhog Day” frequently ranks among the greatest comedies of all time. Maybe that’s because the jokes are good enough to laugh at a second time.

This is a battle between America and Russia near the end of the Cold War. Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky versus Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago. Rocky’s former adversary turned good friend Apollo Creed, played by the late Carl Weathers, will be part of all the stars and stripes hoopla, too. If the trailer had left it at that, it would have been a perfect plug for the movie, which, in 1985, could have packed theaters on the franchise name alone. Unfortunately, they decided to reveal the fact that Creed dies. While this happens early in the film, it recontextualizes everything that follows. It’s the emotional gut punch, or more specifically head punch, to the audience that is sadly muted if they watched the trailer first.

Did these trailers really give too much away? What trailers spoiled the movie for you? Let us know in the comments.