The purpose of trailers isn't to give you an accurate impression of a movie or TV show or game so that you know whether you'd enjoy it -- it's to get your money, whatever it takes. Once they have that, you're someone else's problem. So trailer editors have come up with a series of tricks intended to disguise the true nature of what they want you to pay for.
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#1 Tonight, Someone Dies
Sometimes, the writers will kill off a fairly major character. Because this is a relatively rare event, the death will be hyped up beforehand in ads. In television, these episodes are rating stunts, perhaps broadcast as a season finale or (in the U.S.) during Sweeps week.
This trope differs from Anyone Can Die, since, in that trope, death is relatively unannounced, to reemphasize the shock, whereas, in Tonight Someone Dies, the event is milked for all it is worth before it happens.
In ages past, Contractual Immortality was more dominant. The Tonight Someone Dies promotion would typically consist of a high-speed montage of the series regulars as an ominous voice announced that "Tonight, one of these people will die." Invariably, the doomed character would turn out to be a minor character, one who had never appeared before or was a recent addition, whose presence in the montage was probably overlooked. Killing off a major character might actually be seen as a subversion of this old trick.
Over time, it has become more common to remind viewers that Anyone Can Die, and even regular characters are not exempt from death in a rating ploy.
#2 Tropes Are Tools
Tropes are just tools. Writers understand tropes and use them to control audience expectations either by using them straight or by subverting them, to convey things to the audience quickly without saying them.
Human beings are natural pattern seekers and story tellers. We use stories to convey truths, examine ideas, speculate on the future and discuss consequences. To do this, we must have a basis for our discussion, a new language to show us what we are looking at today. So our storytellers use tropes to let us know what things about reality we should put aside and what parts of fiction we should take up.
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#3 Trailers Always Spoil
Movie trailers are known to mislead, but sometimes they go in the opposite direction, giving away key plot points and twists (and sometimes what would have been a twist ending). The odds of this happening increase for the commercials aired after a movie's opening weekend.
Of course, some of this depends on your definition of "spoiler". Given that a trailer consists mostly of clips from the movie itself, a fair bit of spoilage, in this case, footage from a later part in the movie, is often inevitable.
There is also the matter of context. An action movie, for example, may preview a random fight scene between two characters, but when you actually see the movie itself and realize that the other dude the hero was fighting happened to be his best friend in the beginning (which may or not have also been part of that trailer), you realize in retrospect that the trailer's fight scene was actually a foreshadowing or Chekhov's Gun about the betrayal that occurs later.
#4 Fanvid
Also known as AMVs or Animated/Anime/Amateur Music Videos.note
In a nutshell, a basic concept is to take recorded footage from your favorite movies or TV shows, set all these edited scenes to your favorite music (maybe add some Fan Art or subtitling) put it all together in a digital Movie-Maker on your PC, then upload it to any video streaming site online- and wait for awesome comments to pour in! YouTube is a popular choice.
It's not the most productive activity in the world, but for the most dedicated, it is one of the most time-consuming. Like Fan Fics and Fan Art, making and watching these videos is another way these fans express their consuming obsession over their favorite show.
Naturally, the companies and network executives behind these TV shows and music are mixed on the whole deal. Some companies welcome the support and publicity and even hold competitions for the best video. Others simply turn a blind eye to these videos, neither encouraging them nor forcing them removed under threat of a lawsuit.
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#5 Hype Backlash
Your friends have been bugging you to watch the latest TV show that everyone's talking about. Every newspaper raves about its originality, well-deserved popularity, and effective mix of comedy and drama, on the front page of the Entertainment section. Critics are rushing to hail it as the re-definition of its genre. After the thirtieth or so "Just watch it already, geez!" and maybe a Hype Aversion stage, you finally give in, pop the DVD in your player, and lay back to enjoy the latest masterpiece...
...Except you come away with a very different opinion than your friends; to you, it's at best a mediocre show with average plots and few laughs or an utterly confusing one with more than enough shocking swerves to boggle the mind, a show that definitely isn't the seminal classic everyone's touting it as. What on earth did everybody see in this?
Looks like you've just suffered Hype Backlash.
Usually, occurs when Quality by Popular Vote fails. Most often, the work isn't bad in itself, and would easily have been accepted as a solid and enjoyable work by the same person under different circumstances. But few things can live up to being praised as perfect works of pure genius by lots of people for long. To someone who was expecting nothing short of a flawless masterpiece, the disappointment of anything less can be bitter indeed.
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#6 Fake trailers
Indeed, the creation of fake trailers to make a movie looks like it's from a completely different genre has become one of the Internet's most beloved recent art forms, such as The Shining as a family-oriented romantic comedy, Mary Poppins as a slasher horror flick, Luke Cage as a 90's sitcom, or the one that started it all, The Ten Commandments as a chick flick.
Another way it can backfire is if you can't find enough good footage to make a decent trailer, audiences can extrapolate just how bad the rest of the material must be.
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
