Getty Image / Pascal Le Segretain
When Lionsgate released the latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis the film world was buzzing earlier this week because the first minute and a half (or so) of the trailer was devoted to calling out haters. It featured quote after quote panning previous masterpieces from Francis Ford Coppola, damning quotes about The Godfather and Apocalypse Now among others.
This was incredibly powerful storytelling. The juxtaposition of the quotes and the films, knowing what we know now about how these films are masterpieces, and how they were panned by critics decades ago. All of that set up the latest Megalopolis trailer, a film starring Adam Driver that has had trouble getting off the ground. Coppola has reportedly spent $120 million of his own money on the movie because he believes in it so much while none of the major Hollywoods studio execs share his vision.
Here is that trailer:
it is a true masterstroke devoting half of your inaugural trailer to telling 50 YEARS of your haters to kiss your ass pic.twitter.com/2ZdCypPnvF
— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) August 21, 2024
So when that trailer hit, the impact was ‘wow, maybe he’s going to be right about Megalopolis if all of these quotes are true.’ Then, Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri decided to do some actual journalism work and look up the validity of those quotes and as it turns out, they weren’t real. Things got so bad so fast that Lionsgate had to pull the trailer.
After Bilge Ebiri published that article, Lionsgate immediately pulled the trailer and issued the following apology in response “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.”
Looking at the actual critics and quotes that were used in the trailer… Pauline Kael is quoted in the trailer as saying “Diminished by its artsiness” about The Godfather. As Bilge Ebiri, Pauline Kael actually wrote “This is a bicentennial picture that doesn’t insult the intelligence. It’s an epic vision of the corruption of America.” in praise of the film.
Roger Ebert never wrote “a triumph of style over substance” about Dracula, instead he wrote “he movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.”
It is unclear where these fake quotes were pulled from for the trailer, but on X, some are theorizing that they came from ChatGPT. That would be both shocking and not at all surprising but regardless, at the end of the day, this is another bump in the road for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.