Have Movie Trailers Declined in Quality?

We've all seen movie trailers that looked great for movies turned out to be awful. Is it that easy to mislead the savvy American consumer?

Today I saw a clip from Pulp Fiction out of context in a documentary about Hollywood. The scene they showed was Jules and Vincent's visit with Brad (Frank Whaley) and company to take back the briefcase. You know, the "do they speak English in What" scene. I had always remembered the scene as happening in a room with no windows. When I watched the scene out of context I realized light was streaming in the windows of the young thieves' apartment. The scene is so dark, the young men's trapped sense of doom so palpable, that I literally saw the room as dark every time I saw the film.

After watching the clip I understood how a movie trailer can completely mislead an audience. One may go and sit through a drama having bought a ticket to a comedy. Movies have had no real surprise endings since The Sixth Sense; every twist ending turns out to be the same. One of the main characters is screwed but doesn't figure it out 'til the end when all the clues fall into place.

Because audiences now unravel the secret of the movie before the end, the studio must cut the theatrical trailers in a deliberately confusing way. The thought process behind this decision probably involved a sentiment against insulting the viewer's intelligence. Of course, the person who makes the big decisions about the trailer is so far removed from the average person's experience that the movie ends up insulting their intelligence regardless. Do they really think we're going to watch a movie that is entirely different in tone from its trailer and not realize that we're not seeing the movie we were pitched?