You wouldn’t normally highlight quotes from bad reviews in the trailer for your movie, but that’s what they did for “Megalopolis” — or so it seemed.
On Wednesday morning, Lionsgate released a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive new Atlanta-filmed movie, using bad reviews of previous Coppola masterpieces, basically to urge us not to listen to the critics.
“True genius is often misunderstood,” narrates actor Laurence Fishburne as excerpts of negative reviews of “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” — classics directed by Coppola — appear on screen. “One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time.”
Vulture decided to do some digging and It turns out that those quotes weren’t real. New York and Vulture movie critic Bilge Ebiri found that quotes from noted film critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris did not appear in their reviews of the films cited.
By Wednesday evening, the trailer had been pulled from circulation.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis’,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided 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.”
These quotes weren’t from some unknown critics from small outlets.
“I know that Sarris, ever the delightful contrarian, was less keen on ‘The Godfather,’ but that was to be somewhat expected,” writes Ebiri in the story that first brought this to light. “Still, the quote attributed to him in the trailer (“a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”) is not to be found in his review.”
“Megalopolis,” set to release Sept. 27, follows a visionary architect, played by Adam Driver, clashing with a corrupt mayor, played by Giancarlo Esposito, as he seeks to rebuild a futuristic metropolis after a disaster. Coppola filmed much of it at Trilith Studios in Fayetteville.
Critics were polarized after the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Some loved it. Others hated it.
The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney called it “a lot of movie, much of it quite bad. But you have to respect the staggering ambition of this epic folly, a mashup of the Roman Empire with modern day New York in chaos.” L.A. Times critic Matt Brennan said the film “genuinely moved me. It reads as a closing statement from one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”
