New Megalopolis The trailer dropped earlier today—and it plays into the original conversation about Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project, highlighting the rave reviews of his previous films. (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather) which are now considered works of art. But what seemed like a smart move a few hours ago now sounds like a stunt gone wrong. Studio Lionsgate recently admitted—after Vulture and other Internet pundits began digging into that review—that the quotes were fake.
In a statement to Variety, Lionsgate is fully committed. “Lionsgate will soon recall our car Megalopolis,” a statement provided to the trade read. “We deeply apologize to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our screening process. We went broke. We apologize.”
Although the trailer has since been removed, it contained quotes from legendary critics including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert—writers whose opinions helped shape the public’s movie choices for decades, and whose reviews are easily accessible both in print and online.
Rhett Jones of Gizmodo theorized that someone could have used a chatbot program to come up with fake quotes; here’s what chatGPT came up with when asked about Ebert’s review of Coppola’s 1992 horror romance Bram Stoker’s Draculaone of the examples cited in Megalopolis trailer:
(Any actual use of the chatbot to come up with the quotes used in the trailer is not confirmed; this was just an experiment.)
The trailer quoted Ebert talking about him Dracula such as “style over substance,” a phrase that does not appear in his original review (he it does described as “excessive exercise”), but appears verbatim in the GPT data sample. (io9 reached out to Lionsgate earlier today for comment about Vulture’s story about the fictional quotes, and didn’t hear back before Variety and other outlets printed the studio’s “sinful” statement.)
Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are gone, but one critic has seen his name Megalopolis trailer—Owen Glieberman, formerly of Entertainment Weekly and now of Variety—noticed and had a response.
Speaking to his current outlet, he revealed that the whole idea behind the trailer itself—that Coppola’s best works were misunderstood at first—was a bit of a shocker to begin with. “The critics loved it The Godfather,” he told Variety. “And then Apocalypse Now it was divisive, it received a lot of critical support. Even when I call Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘good chaos,’ I just wish I could say that! As for that film, now it sounds kind.”
Megalopolis is set for a September 27 release in theaters and IMAX. Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, DB Sweeney, Dustin Hoffman, and Aubrey Plaza.
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