David Pogue wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the marketing of National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Masked as something of an ad for the Internet Movie Database, the article dissects the movie’s trailers, telling us about the many clips that aren’t actually in the cut we see at the theater. Is this a form of false advertising? Pogue wonders how far Hollywood can take this type of manipulation:

Rearranging scenes in the trailer is one thing. But what about this business of putting stuff in the trailer — a *lot* of stuff — that isn’t in the movie at all? If they can get away with “National Treasure”-style misrepresentation, what’s to stop other moviemakers from putting special effects, witty lines, exotic locales and hot-looking actors into *their* trailers, just to get us to go to a movie that doesn’t have any of those things?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin Lin’s Annapolis did a couple years back. As you can see from the trailer above, the movie promises many scenes involving aircraft carriers and other Naval ships, as well as flying jets, all that could be expected to be in exciting action sequences. Yet Annapolis never really expands its story beyond the U.S. Naval Academy, and so anyone looking for that action movie must have been disappointed.

The difference between the two movies is great — as is the difference between how much their respective fraudulent marketing affected their box office. Annapolis only made $17.5 million, so not too many people got fooled. National Treasure: Book of Secrets has so far made $231 million … and yet I still figure few people were fooled, because the movie already had a built in audience and the trailers don’t really lie. They merely miscommunicate. Sure the end result is missing some shots — trailers are made so far in advance that their editors don’t know what won’t be in the movie’s final edit — and some bits have a tonal difference that could seem manipulative, but overall the tone is not too different between trailer and movie. And most importantly, there’s nothing in National Treasure’s trailers that indicate it is a different genre than what audiences ultimately view it as. On the other hand, Annapolis‘ trailer has shots that were never intended to be in the movie — they appear to have been taken from recruitment ads — and were inserted with obvious intent to lie to moviegoers, hoping to attract them to a movie they thought to be action-packed.

Like Pogue, I wonder how far Hollywood could go with such manipulation. Combining the deceits of Annapolis and National Treasure: Book of Secrets, a studio could potentially shoot footage not even intended to appear in a movie’s final cut, and that footage could feature the movie’s stars or plot points (as opposed to the Annapolis shots which have little relation to the movie’s story). Actually, I’m sure this has already been done on a small scale. But what if it was done on a bigger level? What if Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t in fact feature Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen)? Or what if it won’t actually feature the Ark of the Covenant, as hinted? Or what if Iron Man won’t actually be seen flying past fighter jets in this summer’s blockbuster Iron Man (it was a topic of discussion last fall)? Well, certainly if American moviegoers were lied to too much and too heavily, they would stop trusting Hollywood, wouldn’t they?