Tainted by the Preview

Now, as with most arcade games of the time, a conversion to the home computer formats was almost inevitable. "Hurray!" we thought! "We can play Street Fighter at home!" Then we were told that it was going to be converted by Tiertex. There were no more hurrays....

—Stuart Ashen, the review of Human Killing Machine

Sometimes, hyping your project in advance is a double-edged sword. In the best-case scenario, you get people excited about the things that will be in your upcoming movie/show/game/media extravaganza, and early ads will build interest for when the work finally comes out.

And then there are the cases where the advance word results in a large amount of complaining. Tainted by the Preview covers all those instances where the would-be audience for something yet to come out immediately decides it detests something about it, based on a preview, and starts complaining about it. Vociferously.

Mind you, they have no idea whether or not yet it's actually worthy of complaint - the project in question might be over a year away. This doesn't matter to them; they need to proclaim immediately that the project in question is Ruined FOREVER.

While this can happen with brand-new projects, this most often happens with older series with established fanbases. A series with a Broken Base is nearly guaranteed to have some portion react this way; a previously-united fanbase might become one if this reaction isn't universal. Of course, it's always possible that this reaction will be universal whether or not the base is broken; the project can be in real trouble if that's the case.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the preview itself is poorly constructed.

This is a specific, pre-release version of They Changed It, Now It Sucks (although people Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch will sometimes carry this attitude if they manage to stay steadfast in their dislike of the project in question).

Fortunately, it's comparatively easy for anything falling under this trope to be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap - all it has to do is be better than people expected (and given how low the expectations are in many cases...). Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for the first impressions to be the right ones.

Contrast And the Fandom Rejoiced, although this trope can follow that one.

Examples of Tainted by the Preview include:

Film

The backlash to the title character's appearance in the trailer for the live action Sonic the Hedgehog film was so universally negative that the production company pushed back its release from 2019 to 2020 in order to completely redesign the character.
The 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters had a first trailer so atrocious, it gave people with misgivings about its Gender Flipped franchise reboot nature even more reasons to preemptively dislike the film, opening the door to a public opinion controversy that degenerated into a full war-of-the-sexes and which eventually damaged the reception of the film when it was finally released.