Francis Ford Coppola’s long-in-the-works “Megalopolis” finally hits theaters next month. A new trailer, released earlier Wednesday by Lionsgate, takes a more combative approach to the film’s marketing.
At the beginning of the video, apparent quotes from reviews of previous Coppola masterpieces like “Apocalypse Now” and “The Godfather” flash on the screen. It’s a way of getting ahead of the divisive response to “Megalopolis,” which left critics bewildered when it screened at this year’s Cannes. It’s also pretty funny. The only problem… as New York Magazine critic Bilge Ebiri pointed out, the quotes are all made up.
The question remains: what happened, exactly?
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a Lionsgate spokesman told TheWrap after the company pulled the trailer down. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
Canadian cinematographer Devan Scott speculated on X (formerly Twitter) that a marketing intern asked an AI chatbot for “negative contemporaneous reviews of ‘The Godfather.’” The quotes used in the trailer could have been what the chatbot generated and nobody checked.
What makes this such an unforced error is that Lionsgate could have probably made up quotes and contributed them to the Kansas City Star or San Antonio Express News and nobody would have blinked twice, but the fact that they invoked legendary (and easily fact-checked) critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, “two of the greatest names in film criticism” (as Ebiri said), feels weird and unnecessary.
Kael, for her part, loved “The Godfather.” Her opening line reads, “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, ‘The Godfather’ is it.” Nowhere does the phrase attributed to her (“diminished by its artsiness”) show up in her review — of any of the “Godfather” installments. Ditto Sarris’ quote (“a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”), which does not appear in his original review of “The Godfather” either. Roger Ebert mostly liked “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” which, as Ebiri noted, was rare for the time. Even the quotes that align with the original sentiment of the critic (like Rex Reed despising “Apocalypse Now”) are still wholly made-up.
This isn’t the first time a studio has played fast and loose with phony film-critic quotes. Most famously, in the early 2000s, Sony was busted for fabricating a critic named David Manning, who supposedly wrote for an actual newspaper — The Ridgefield Press, a small outlet in suburban Connecticut. That debacle ended in an out-of-court settlement with Sony agreeing to pay those who saw one of the Manning-endorsed movies (including “A Knight’s Tale,” “The Animal” and “Hollow Man”) $5. This was around the time it was revealed that Sony employees had posed as everyday moviegoers during a television ad for “The Patriot.”
Either way, “Megalopolis” hits theaters Sept. 27.
