Studio pulls ‘Megalopolis’ trailer featuring fake review quotes

A new trailer for 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 Wednesday.

The trailer, which was posted in the morning, featured quotes from well-known film critics of the past including Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, Vincent Canby of The New York Times and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times panning previous Coppola films like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

However, as critic Bilge Ebiri first reported in 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 American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”

Megalopolis, which was self-financed by Coppola and is due in theaters Sept. 27, was initially unable to find a buyer until Lionsgate stepped in. The epic fantasy premiered to a decidedly mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival. On Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at just 53 per cent fresh among critics. The trailer seemed to be an effort to show that reviews don’t always get it right when it comes to Coppola’s work.

The spot quoted Kael as saying The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” when in reality she wrote about it glowingly. While Canby, who served as senior film critic at The New York Times from 1969 to 1993, wasn’t a fan of Apocalypse Now, calling it an “intellectual muddle,” he didn’t use the phrase “hollow at the core" as the trailer indicates.

The trailer also featured fake quotes from Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and Rex Reed in The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, according to the Vulture report.

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 tools were used, started feeding prompts to ChatGPT looking for similar results.

Lionsgate would not comment on whether ChatGPT or other tools powered by artificial intelligence were used for the trailer.

The pulled trailer was not the first controversy surrounding the film. A report in 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, Darren Demetre, has said he was unaware of any harassment complaints made during the production, and Coppola later told the Times, “I’m not touchy-feely,” Coppola said. “I’m too shy.”