The bad movie reviews quoted in Lionsgate’s Megalopolis trailer were mostly made up

Hours after it was released, Lionsgate pulled a trailer for Megalopolis that was clearly “gunning for the haters” with a selection of negative quotes about director Francis Ford Coppola’s previous works. That’s because reports like this one from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri showed that critic quotes in the trailer lambasting films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were fabricated.

“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “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.”

That all led some people to immediately wonder whether the quotes may have been generated by a tool like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Chatbots, and ChatGPT specifically, will create quotes in responses to queries complete with citations and even fake URLs for content that never existed. A famous example is a case earlier this year where a lawyer cited judicial decisions that did not exist. The lawyer admitted using ChatGPT for his research and said he was “unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

We’ve asked Lionsgate if it used a generative AI tool as part of the creation of the trailer but haven’t heard back.

Variety also reports that one of its staffers was falsely quoted in the trailer over their review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and that a Roger Ebert quote attributed to his Dracula review was actually from a review of the 1989 Batman.