Vic over at Screenrant has an excellent question for Paramount pertaining to their marketing strategy for Beowulf. The movie is rated PG-13, so why create an R-rated, red-band trailer for the flick. If the trailer is restricted and not appropriate for all audiences, but the movie will (more or less) be, than the trailer by definition contains material that won’t be in the finished movie. That, Vic says (and I agree), has the potential to create a lot of expectations in people’s minds that are not going to be met.

My guess – and this is just a guess – is that Paramount felt like creating this sort of disconnect was worth the risk. They may not have been getting the geek-buzz they were hoping for with this flick and so felt the red-band trailer was needed to jumpstart the conversation. I don’t really see another rationale for this. If people are seeing a naked Angelina Jolie in the trailer than they damn well better see a naked Angelina Jolie on the big screen in the movie itself.

But the studio is trading short-term buzz for long-term negative word-of-mouth and that’s going to come back to bite them when people realize the movie isn’t as risque as the trailer promised.

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