The buzz around Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film just got a whole lot weirder.
While cinephiles were veritably salivating to see his polarizing new epic “Megalopolis,” Coppola was accused earlier this year of trying to kiss his extras — and is now seeing his latest trailer yanked for featuring fake or misattributed quotes from long-dead movie critics.
Lionsgate apologized on Wednesday and said it was pulling the trailer it had released.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the studio told multiple outlets in a statement. “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,” the statement continued plainly. “We are sorry.”
The trailer footage begins by quoting unfavorable reviews of Coppola’s past films, presumably to paint the director as a misunderstood genius.
The problem is, the quotes themselves are either fake, or are real quotes taken wildly out of context.
A quote attributed to Andrew Sarris from “The Village Voice” calling “The Godfather” a “sloppy, self-indulgent movie” does not exist, for instance, and Vincent Canby never said “Apocalypse Now” was “hollow at the core” in his New York Times review of the war movie.
The trailer also featured fake quotes from film critics Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, falsely suggesting Kael slammed “The Godfather” as “diminished by its artsiness” and that Ebert called “Dracula” a “triumph of style over substance.”
Kael actually asserted the opposite in her 1972 “New Yorker” critique of “The Godfather,” writing at the time: “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it.”
Ebert noted in his three-star Chicago Sun-Times review of “Dracula” that the 1992 film “is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.”
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While Coppola has yet to provide an explanation for the false quotes from the now-deceased critics, entertainment news outlet Consequence reported on Wednesday that a Chat GPT prompt to “collect negative reviews of Coppola classics” spurred a flurry of fake quotes.
Whether Lionsgate actually relied on AI to market the film remains unclear; the studio did not reply to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“Megalopolis” is set to hit theaters on Sept. 27 and features a star-studded cast including Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman. While the film premiered at Cannes to mixed reviews, Coppola is facing the fallout from May’s misconduct allegations.
“I was in shock,” Lauren Pagone, one of the extras who said Coppola kissed her without asking, told Variety earlier this month. “I didn’t expect him to kiss and hug me like that. I was caught off guard. And I can tell you he came around a couple of times.”
The 85-year-old director denied any wrongdoing in June and told The New York Times: “I’m too shy.”
