Part 2
When the trailer house gets handed a tone the film does not have
The reverse of the A24 case is a warning. For Suicide Squad in 2016, Warner Bros brought in the trailer house Trailer Park to lighten a film director David Ayer had cut as a darker drama, and the first teaser leaned hard into comedy, cutting to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" over a parade of quips from the cast. Test audiences reportedly responded so well to that version that footage closer to it made its way into the theatrical release. The mismatch between the trailer's tone and the finished film's tone became one of the most cited reasons critics gave for its poor reception. A trailer house can only work with the footage it gets, and when a studio asks it to sell a different film than the one that was shot, the seams show eventually.
Why the mismatch is rarely the trailer house's fault
It is worth being fair to the editors here. A trailer house is handed footage and a deadline, and it is rarely in a position to argue with a studio about what the finished film should be. When a campaign misreads a film's tone, the more useful question is what instructions the studio gave, not whether the cutters did their job well within those instructions.
What this means for you as a viewer
If a trailer feels tonally busier or lighter than everything else you know about a director's other work, that gap is itself information. It is worth cross-checking against how a film actually plays across a full viewing, since first impressions built on a trailer alone are the least reliable kind.
None of this makes trailers dishonest. It makes them a compressed, commercial art form with its own rules, cut by people whose job depends on you buying a ticket rather than on you being surprised once you sit down. Watch the next one twice: once to feel it, once to catch the machinery.
