Lionsgate is working to take down its trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis after it was revealed to include fabricated quotes from movie critics.
Said a Lionsgate spokesperson in a statement: “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.”
The trailer launched Monday and featured supposed snippets from reviews for Coppola masterpieces such as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now. His latest, Megalopolis, has been divisive and controversial from the get-go, and these fabricated quotes seemed to show that Coppola has been doubted before, even for movies that are considered classics.
But as Vulture first pointed out, the negative quotes featured in the trailer do not actually appear in those vintage reviews.
Andrew Sarris’ The Village Voice review was quoted as calling The Godfather “A sloppy self-indulgent movie,” while Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review supposedly called it “diminished by its artsiness.” It goes on from there, with The New York Times’ Vincent Canby’s review of Apocalypse Now supposedly calling the 1979 film “hollow at its core” and Roger Ebert accusing Bram Stroker’s Dracula of being “style over substance.” But they weren’t real. Oddly enough, some of the original reviews do indeed feature quotes that, taken out of context as they often are in movie trailers, may have served the purpose of painting a picture that Coppola has been doubted before.
Megalopolis has been one of the great movie experiments of 2024. Coppola spent decades getting the $120 million epic off the ground and brought it to Cannes in May for a splashy premiere, where it was greeted with a 10-minute standing ovation from the audience, but mixed response from critics. Lionsgate ultimately boarded as a distributor, though the filmmaker or his investors are expected to pay for the marketing.
The original trailer is still available on YouTube on third-party accounts, but was pulled from Lionsgate’s page.