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A new Megalopolis trailer dropped earlier today—and it played into the mixed early buzz surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project, highlighting tepid reviews of his past films (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather) that are now considered masterpieces. But what seemed like a clever gimmick a few hours ago now feels like a stunt gone very wrong. Studio Lionsgate has just admitted—after Vulture and other online sleuths began poking deeper into those reviews—that the quotes were not real.
In a statement to Variety, Lionsgate took full responsibility. “Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the statement provided to the trade read. “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.”
While the trailer has since been removed, it contained quotes from legendary critics including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert—writers whose opinions helped shaped the public’s moviegoing choices for decades, and whose reviews are very easily accessible in both print and online.
Gizmodo’s Rhett Jones theorized that someone could have used a chatbot program to come up with the false quotes; here’s what chatGPT came up with when he asked it about Ebert’s review of Coppola’s 1992 horror romance Bram Stoker’s Dracula, one of the examples cited in the Megalopolis trailer:
(Any actual use of a chatbot to come up with the quotes used in the trailer is unconfirmed; this was just an experiment.)
The trailer quoted Ebert as referring to Dracula as having “style over substance,” a phrase that does not appear in his actual review (he does describe it as “an exercise in feverish excess”), but does appear nearly verbatim in the sample chatGPT prompt. (io9 reached out to Lionsgate earlier today for comment regarding Vulture’s story about the fabricated quotes, and did not hear a response before Variety and other trades printed the studio’s “we screwed up” statement.)
Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are no longer alive, but one critic who spotted his name in the Megalopolis trailer—Owen Glieberman, formerly of Entertainment Weekly and now at Variety—took note and had a response.
Speaking to his current outlet, he pointed out that the whole idea behind the trailer itself—that Coppola’s best works were misunderstood at first—was a shaky one to begin with. “Critics loved The Godfather,” he told Variety. “And though Apocalypse Now was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘a beautiful mess,’ I only wish I’d said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind.”
Megalopolis is slated for a September 27 release in theaters and IMAX. It stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, Dustin Hoffman, and Aubrey Plaza.
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