Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis continues streak of bad press as Lionsgate's latest trailer uses fake critic quotes
It's cooked, Jim.
Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis' road to the big screen has been a bumpy one to say the least, and one has to wonder how many more scandals can befall it before its planned September 27 release date in the United States. The latest drama comes from a bunch of fabricated critic quotes plastered all over the new trailer that Lionsgate has put together.
Following a less-than-ideal reception (only 53% of critics on RT gave it a thumbs up) at the Cannes Film Festival 2024, some crew members claimed that Coppola's on-set behavior was unprofessional to say the least. These two snafus alone indicated the self-financed $120 million behemoth, which stars Adam Driver and many other big-name actors, could be facing a lot of trouble when it finally opens (it also struggled to find distribution), but Lionsgate's mistake while kickstarting the US promotion of the movie is lowering its chances of making any significant amount of money.
On Wednesday morning, Lionsgate uploaded a new trailer that gave those cinephiles still hopeful (or just morbidly curious) plenty to chew on. Sadly, it also included a bunch of head-scratching critic quotes that highlighted how many of his 'classics' were once blasted as well. That alone is a dangerous game to play following a divisive reception, but we'll admit it's an eye-catching one that could generate some buzz. The problem is that most (if not all) of those quotes aren't real or have been misplaced.
Lionsgate has since removed the trailer from its official channels, but you can still watch it via other YouTube channels dedicated to movies. Via Variety, here's part of the statement released by Lionsgate: "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis... 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."
Some of the biggest quotes included legends of the movie criticism space such as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, but the phrases highlighted in the trailer couldn't be found in their respective reviews of the movies in question. To make matters funnier, Ebert's "a triumph of style over substance" quote actually comes from his 1989 review of Batman, not Dracula. At the time of writing, it's unclear where most of the quotes came from or how they were 'remixed' so badly, but some people are already theorizing about the possible use of ChatGPT to grab them, which wouldn't surprise us at all because we're currently living in a nightmare world.
The trailer is expected to go online again once the quotes have been edited out and replaced with real quotes that real people said about his movies. You'd expect movie studios' marketing teams to have better fact-checking skills or to simply not try to misguide potential moviegoers with information that can easily be proven as fake, yet here we are.