Right. The quality of a trailer has very little to do with the quality of the movie, right ? That's what I think you're saying ?
Not exactly. It's true in some cases (re: Fight Club again). In general, I think that the quality of trailers is going to equal or exceed the quality of the movie. So if it's a really shitty trailer (Paul Blart), then I know to give the movie a pass.
Since the purpose of the trailer is to be good enough to get people into theatres, I have to be careful if a trailer looks really good. It might be for a turd.
I would say that trailers are unnecessary, but that's not really true. It's more accurate to say that I'm not the audience for trailers. The hoi polloi are likely to eat up trailers and base their movie-going experience [citation needed]. So the marketing arm puts so much effort into the trailers to grab those people. Regardless of the trailer, I'll browse the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes to see if it is a movie that'll appeal to me. It works pretty well, though it's disappointed a few times (goddammit, Furious 7). So I'll enjoy watching trailers, but they aren't necessary for
me.
And yeah, Crimson Peak was just a mess of a movie anyway. I can't blame marketing for doing that with the trailer, because the movie didn't know which way to go. When presented with elements of gothic horror and Victorian suspense, marketing is going to go with horror because that'll get more butts in seats.
Trailers also did a hatchet job to Terminator 2. I remember when that movie came out, all the buzz was about how Arnold is the good guy this time. That's too bad, because the movie was filmed with the right level of suspense. Arnold did not present himself as the good guy until the fight in the mall. In fact, if the filmmakers didn't show the T-1000 murdering people, they really could have lulled us into one mindset and then skullfucked our perception of who's good and who's bad. But marketing was apparently afraid that a mere sequel wouldn't be enough to draw in people (they're not wrong), so they hyped up the Arnold factor. And this was before the WWW, so word of mouth was more limited.
I think the best trailer was for the Matrix. When that movie came out, I didn't know what to expect. They were really tight-lipped about what the Matrix was about. But it generated enough excitement to get people to go see it.