'We screwed up': Lionsgate pulls Megalopolis trailer featuring fake ...
Updated
Aug 22, 2024, 05:34 PM
Published
Aug 22, 2024, 04:35 PM
LOS ANGELES – A new trailer for American director Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, featuring fake negative quotes from film critics, has been pulled by the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate, a spokesperson for the company said on Aug 21.
The trailer, which was posted in the morning, featured quotes from well-known American film critics of the past, including Ms Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, Mr Vincent Canby of The New York Times (NYT) and Mr Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, panning previous Coppola films like The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).
But, as critic Bilge Ebiri first reported in American entertainment news website Vulture, the quotes are not real. The trailer has now been pulled from YouTube, after amassing more than 1.3 million views in the single day it was online.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and (production company) American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
Megalopolis, which was self-financed by Coppola, 85, and is due to open in Singapore cinemas on Sept 26, was initially unable to find a buyer until Lionsgate stepped in.
The epic fantasy, starring American actor Adam Driver, premiered to a decidedly mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival in May. On review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at 53 per cent fresh among critics. The trailer seemed to be an effort to show that reviews do not always get it right when it comes to Coppola’s work.
The spot quoted Ms Kael as saying The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness”, when in reality, she wrote about it glowingly. While Mr Canby, who served as senior film critic at NYT from 1969 to 1993, was not a fan of Apocalypse Now, calling it an “intellectual muddle”, he did not use the phrase “hollow at the core” as the trailer indicates.
The trailer also featured fake quotes from Mr Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, Mr Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Mr Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and Mr Rex Reed in The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, according to the Vulture report.
Mr John Simon of National Review is also included in the spot, and a writer for the magazine posted on X that the staff was checking the archive but believed it to be false.
It is unclear how the faked quotes were created. Some on social media, speculating that artificial intelligence (AI) tools were used, started feeding prompts to ChatGPT looking for similar results. Lionsgate would not comment on whether ChatGPT or other tools powered by AI were used for the trailer.
The pulled trailer was not the first controversy surrounding the film.
A report in British newspaper The Guardian in May quoted anonymous sources accusing Coppola of trying to kiss female extras on the set of a nightclub scene. An executive co-producer, Mr Darren Demetre, has said he was unaware of any harassment complaints made during the production.
“I’m not touchy-feely,” Coppola later told NYT. “I’m too shy.” NYTIMES
