Lionsgate, which is distributing Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming movie Megalopolis in the U.S., is apologizing for its latest promotional trailer. The studio pulled it down after it went up online on Wednesday.
The film stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Coppola spent part of his fortune from his wine business to make the indie movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over the summer.
Early reviews have been mixed, and to head off any naysayers, Lionsgate released the unusual trailer.
“One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” declares the trailer’s narrator, Laurence Fishburne, who also stars in the film. “True genius is often misunderstood.”
Superimposed over title images from the films Apocalypse Now and The Godfather are quotes supposedly written by well-known film critics trashing his previous movies when they came out.
“A sloppy, self-indulgent movie,” reads a quote attributed to Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice.
“Hollow at the core” reads another attributed to Vincent Canby of The New York Times.
“Diminished by its artsiness,” reads another attributed to Pauline Kael of The New Yorker.
However, as first reported in Vulture, all these quotes appear to have been fabricated. Online searches of old film reviews came up negative, and some of the critics who are still alive say those aren’t their words. Some suggested the quotes may have been from reviews of entirely different movies or possibly generated by AI.
“Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw?” wrote Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri. “Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be?
After the outcry, Lionsgate immediately recalled the trailer and sent out a statement. “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.”
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