We Don’t Blame You For Missing Edge Of Tomorrow. We Blame The Trailer.

This article is from our friends at Trunkworthy

The should-have-been blockbuster from Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible writer/director Christopher McQuarrie had everything going for it. And yet . . .

When the trailers and TV spots promoting Edge Of Tomorrow hit screens in 2013, it was no surprise the movie tanked at theaters: The film was marketed with a slow, plodding succession of dramatic moments set to music so anesthetic that the action scenes seem like flashy punctuation marks to the intense, romantically charged dreck on screen. Lots of Tom Cruise looking at Emily Blunt in poorly lit, dingy spaces . . . and some car chases. Strangely boring car chases. It projected a sort of “When Starship Troopers Met Children of Men” quality, which is probably not a movie you’d want to watch and, thankfully, is nothing at all like the movie you get to —and need to — watch.

In fact, Edge Of Tomorrow is a hyper-paced, clever, and hilariously shot action film, which plays with almost-nonlinear looping storytelling techniques. It’s as if Groundhog Day made out with Aliens while knife-fighting with the weirder parts of Memento. Power armor. Tentacled aliens. Time travel. Combat humor. And Tom Cruise dying with a frequency and flair that would put Wile E. Coyote to shame. You’d think a movie with all that couldn’t go wrong . . . AND IT DIDN’T. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of smart, creative, mind-bending adventure everyone thinks is missing from Hollywood blockbusters. But you’d never know any of that from watching the trailer.

And we’re not alone on this one — following its miserable theatrical run, the studio went in to triage mode to salvage a movie that somehow failed in spite of its A-list cast and critical acclaim (90% on Rotten Tomatoes). They not only cut a completely new trailer, they created new artwork with the movie’s tagline, LIVE. DIE. REPEAT., recast as the movie’s title. It worked — Live Die Repeat: Edge Of Tomorrow debuted at #1 on the Home Video charts. And Tom Cruise had enough faith in the man who wrote the film to give him control of this week’s biggest movie, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Now Cruise is even talking about a sequel. And we’re very much hoping it happens.

MORE FROM TRUNKWORTHY:

• 5 Awesome Films Failed by Their Awful Trailers
• In the Spirit of This Trailer We’re Going to Refrain From Internet Headline Hyperbole
• Kurt Cobain: “Over the Edge Pretty Much Defined My Whole Personality.”