Is This the Worst Trailer of 2008?

The year is still young, but I believe I’ve watched the worst trailer of 2008. It’s not merely that the trailer was shockingly bad, but it’s that it has plenty of stars and a summer release date that makes its potential failure so much greater than any other movie this year. As I watched the extraordinarily long trailer on TV (150 second spot), I scratched my head and wondered if this was a parody on MADtv. It looked like a amateurish rehash of gags from Goldmember. The stars were acting so poorly that it had to be a joke. Yet, the end of the trailer displayed a June release date and IMDB confirmed that The Love Guru is a real movie.

Many readers might wonder, what’s so shocking about a big summer movie looking bad? Isn’t that a time honored tradition? There are plenty of big-budget movies that look silly, that critics savagely review and that audiences still show up for in droves. The difference here is the trailer is so convolutedly absurd and so recycled that it seems like something out of The Producers. Did a group of executive producers plan out some elaborate way to cheat a studio out of money with A Springtime For Hitler-like movie? Most bad movies look like failed experiments, but this looks engineered to be bad.

I know plots don’t matter when studios have a good release date and big stars signed, but this story seems like something even the Date Movie and Meet The Spartan writers might pass up on. An American who grew up in India that comes to the USA to help a hockey player win back his wife from Justin Timberlake and also win the Stanley Cup? Throw in Jessica Alba for demographic appeal and a some hilarious sexual jokes. Any one one of these plot elements would have made for a bad movie, but they’ve skillfully combined them all.

I’ll admit, my taste in trailers has lead to some off-the-mark sentiments. I thought the Knocked Up trailer was horrible. The red-banded R-rated version looked even worse. Yet, that movie was a critical and box office success. Perhaps, audiences will find the trailer funny or ironically bad. In the The Producers, it worked out very well for Springtime for Hitler. Mike Myers is also a proven provider of blockbusters even if this isn’t a sequel to a proven franchise like Austin Powers.

Predicting the popularity of an upcoming movie is inherently difficult even a few days before its release date, let alone several months, so I may end up eating the words of this article come June. Although, I can predict with some certainty that I will not be in line for The Love Guru on June 20th.