5 Famous Films Hollywood Had Zero Faith In

5

Marvel Thought Kids Wouldn't Like Iron Man, So They Released "Iron Man Advertorials"

Iron Man is, at last count, the single most bankable character in the entire history of cinema. This was absolutely not the case before the 2008 movie came out. Hardly anyone had even heard of the comic book hero, so the studio did the responsible thing and held focus groups to see how much he'd interest people -- specifically, how much he'd interest children, the demo who truly controls everything. It turned out he did not interest them very much at all. Not so long as he appeared to be a flying robot, something kids had stopped finding cool some decades previously.

So Marvel had a mission to teach kids and potential ticket buyers that there was indeed a man in that metal suit. You'd think this would a fact easily teachable through trailers and the posters they were going to have to make anyway, but they went a step further and produced a set of animated shorts they called the Iron Man Advertorials. The cartoons also aimed to show Iron Man was just as powerful and cool as known heroes Hulk and Spider-Man. They released these on their websites, including their dedicated Marvel Kids site.

Marvel Companies used to have websites, instead of YouTube and Facebook pages.

The shorts -- here are all three of them rolled into one -- were made by future Deadpool director Tim Miller and his mo-cap/animation team. Watching them, you might be struck by how weird it is that Marvel was able to put a video together teaming Iron Man and Spider-Man up, when they wouldn't be allowed to so on the big screen for another seven years. They didn't have the film rights to Spidey at this point, but they did still own the character. It's also surreal hearing Iron Man not voiced by Robert Downey Jr. It's just wrong. It's like the promo footage from that upcoming Avengers video game, where it looks like all the Avengers are being played by the actors' stunt doubles.

The really big takeaway here is, wow. The Avengers four years later steals this short's exact ending. Iron Man grabs a nuke and takes it out into space to save the city, it explodes out there, his suit's systems fail, he falls down back to the earth, and then Hulk suddenly appears to catch him -- even though there was zero mention of Hulk in this video at all till this exact second.

Marvel Later, Hulk pets a puppy. This is better than 90% of Hulk movies.

But it's also kind of funny to see them having to market Iron Man to kids as "he's strong, and he's best buds with the heroes you know," while they marketed him to adults as "this is Tony, he drinks and gets laid!" Kids or adults -- none of us are very mature.

4

To Avoid Predicted Catholic Backlash, H.R. Giger Made Alien Eggs Look Less Vaginal

Alien's set design was 85% genitalia. There may have been a time when audiences were naive enough that we had to tell them, breathlessly, "Did you know that this film actually has a sexual subtext?!" but today, it's clear: the whole movie is just rooms and rooms of peens and hoo-has. Even so, there's least a sort of layer of metaphor to it, right? For example, the second mouth of the alien is phallic, but it doesn't sprout from between the alien's legs, which would have been too explicit even for a film like this.

3

Fearing Audiences Wouldn't Understand What Anyone Was Talking About, Dune Distributed Glossaries Along With Tickets

Fantasy stories overflow with impenetrable jargon. This is why plenty of people stay far away from them, and also why nerds love them so much (it also reminds them of how, back in school, even if they weren't as cool as everyone else, they at least had far superior vocabulary). The producers behind Dune took a look at all of the words you had to learn and recall as you watched the film and found them to be more than you can expect anyone to put up with. Bene gesserit? Kwisatz haderach? Sardaukar? How were audiences supposed to deal with all that gibberish? Also, was it possible to rename the Thufir Hawat character Jack Clay or something catchy?

We mock studio execs for underestimating audiences, but when it comes to this kind of fantasy lingo, they have a point. It really is hard to learn all those words, and that's even when reading, when you can go as slow as you like maybe move your lips during the especially tricky parts. Picking up all those words in a movie is like trying to learn a language by watching a foreign film -- technically possible, but more than you should ask of anyone. So along with reels of the finished movie, the studio sent out printed glossaries to theaters to distribute to all moviegoers.

printed version. " width="300" height="393" class="lazy" data-src="https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/2/8/3/738283_v2.jpg" />via Gizmodo The text was slightly larger in the printed version.

2

George Lucas Bet Against Star Wars

Steven Spielberg was making Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the same time as George Lucas was making Star Wars. Each believed the other's film would be more successful. They were still relatively young men, you see, years away from being buried under hundreds of millions of dollars and being told by everyone around them that they were infallible.

1

Miracle On 34th Street Didn't Want People To Know It Was A Christmas Movie

Wait, how do you possibly market this movie about believing in Santa without including Christmas? And why would you want to? Was Santa's appearance supposed to be some grand twist that would be ruined by any foreknowledge? Or, this being the 1940s, was this that War on Christmas we've heard so much about?

The issue was, back then, films wouldn't release nationwide simultaneously. They'd start in the biggest cities, so if a movie had to be absolutely everywhere by Christmas (as would make sense for a Christmas film), it had to release in NYC a while before that, in a season where no one was interested in watching Christmas movies. So Miracle On 34th Street was released in May, which meant they had to hide the Christmas elements if they wanted any New Yorkers to see it.

They were probably going a little overboard with the early release schedule, but the studio didn't care much since they didn't have much faith in the movie either way. So they put out a poster, which had to include the actor who plays Santa, but he isn't dressed as Santa, and he's tiny compared to the other actors:

20th Century Pictures Can't see him? He's the smudge in the middle.