Lionsgate apologizes after getting caught faking Megalopolis trailer quotes

"We screwed up," the studio said about the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's latest, which attributed apparently fake quotes to film critics

By William Hughes | August 21, 2024 | 8:34pm

Photo: Lionsgate

Film News Francis Ford Coppola

Lionsgate apologizes after getting caught faking Megalopolis trailer quotes

The distributors of Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film Megalopolis were forced to pull the film’s latest trailer from the internet today, after performing one of the most baffling incidents of self-ownership we’ve witnessed from a studio in a minute. Per Variety, Lionsgate has yanked the trailer for Coppola’s film from the internet, issuing a literal “We screwed up” statement, and putting out apologies to film critics and Coppola himself, after being caught attributing quotes about Coppola’s work to well-known critics who… never actually said those things. “Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the studio said in 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.”

The hilarious part being, of course that the quotes in question—attributed to Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and other well-known and long-serving critics—were aggressively negative, because the thrust of the trailer was, basically, “Critics always say they don’t like Coppola’s movies now, sure, but they come around on them eventually.” This included suggesting that critics were harsh on The Godfather—i.e., a movie that was embraced basically instantly by the vast majority of movie nerds and regular folks alike, before it was then given the Best Picture Oscar in 1973. Even with Apocalypse Now—which did get at least some mixed reviews back in the day—no one has been able to source the specific quotes the trailer used, suggesting they were fabricated. In fact, the only quote anyone can definitely attribute from the trailer is Roger Ebert’s “a triumph of style over substance”—except Ebert said that about Tim Burton’s Batman, not Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, suggesting someone got very confused about their 1990s bat-related films in the process of putting this thing together. (Or, y’know, asked ChatGPT for a list of mean movie critic quotes about Francis Ford Coppola and then completely failed to verify them before releasing a trailer containing them to millions of people.)

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The fact that all of this has happened to a movie that is about the primacy of creative honesty as a force in the world (with Adam Driver starring in Megalopolis as an architect trying to take the world back from corrupting forces) is only an extra layer of irony. It’s clear someone generated a thesis to try to get around the film’s bad press (which extends from very wary reviews out of festival appearances, to mixed accounts surrounding accusations regarding Coppola’s conduct on set) and then… realized it might be kind of hard to prove, so they just winged it on a Friday afternoon, before calling it a day. One more embarrassment, for a film that really wasn’t hurting for them.