I am seeing numbers for Materialists on r/boxoffice and it's doing great ($24m after second weekend on a budget of $20m.) But everyone is saying that it could've done better if the marketing had been different. A lot of reviews from people said that it was marketed as one thing and turned out to be something different.
The movie was marketed as a rom com. But it turned out to be mostly romance drama. People who know Celine Song from Past Lives would know that she is a deeper writer than what it was being marketed as. Someone said that the marketing made people who would not like the movie interested in it and people who would like it disinterested.
Have there been any other cases where a movie could not reach its potential at the box office, just because of misguided marketing which affected the reviews?