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After decades of trying to get Megalopolis made, director Francis Ford Coppola put up $120 million of his own money for the film. But the promotional campaign is off to a rocky start after the trailer was pulled by Lionsgate because fans discovered that it quoted fake reviews for Coppola’s earlier movies.
Megalopolis was already facing bad buzz after its festival screenings. The trailer seemed like it was designed to counter that by quoting contemporary negative reviews for The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The implication was that critics were wrong about these classics, and also wrong about Megalopolis. However, it didn’t take long for people to realize that the reviews in question weren’t real.
Via Variety, a Lionsgate spokesperson said, “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.”
It’s not entirely clear how the fake reviews were put together. Roger Ebert’s quote, attributed to his Dracula review, was actually pulled from his review for Tim Burton’s Batman. Additionally, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac discovered that the fake reviews may have been generated by ChatGPT.
The quotes are seemingly “paraphrased” from the actual reviews. As Isaac notes, that’s not definitive proof that the quotes were taken directly from ChatGPT and put into the trailer. But it’s already an epic blunder that may outlive the movie it was designed to promote.
Megalopolis will hit theaters on September 27.
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