Lionsgate has pulled a trailer for upcoming movie Megalopolis due to the use of fake quotes from film critics.
The film, self-funded by legendary director Francis Ford Coppola after trying to get it made through Hollywood for decades, is a science-fiction take on the fall of Rome with an ensemble cast featuring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Via Variety, the now-deleted trailer featured quotes from critics bashing Coppola’s previous films that are now considered classics, in an attempt to create a narrative that this new film can cut through any negativity and become a cornerstone of cinema.
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However, people noticed that the featured quotes don’t appear in the reviews at all. In the case of Roger Ebert’s “a triumph of style over substance” quote, which the trailer claimed was about Coppola’s movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992, is actually from his review of Tim Burton’s Batman three years earlier.
One of the critics falsely cited is Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman. He also reviewed Coppola’s vampire movie back in the day, but didn’t call it “a beautiful mess” as the trailer indicated.
“Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths,” he said.
“Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole Megalopolis trailer is built on a false narrative. Critics loved The Godfather. And though Apocalypse Now was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support.”
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Lionsgate issued an apology over the controversy, saying 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.”
Megalopolis is set to hit UK and US cinemas on September 27.
Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016.
In his time he’s covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles.
A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe’s main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he’s not got the time to play.
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