Francis Ford Coppola Calls Out Critics in ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer

Francis Ford Coppola’s dream project Megalopolis, a movie he has literally spent decades trying to make — and now has staked much of his personal fortune on — premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received extremely mixed reviews. One critic called the film “exhilarating.” Another said “It’s hard to believe the same brilliant director who made The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now also birthed this monstrosity. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently has a 53 percent rating.”

The new trailer for Megalopolis seems like an attempt to get out in front of the fact that it’s not a universally acclaimed film. It doesn’t address any of its reviews — but it does quote from many of Coppola’s negative reviews throughout his career for those very films listed above. Andrew Sarris called The Godfather “a sloppy self-indulgent movie.” Vincent Canby said Apocalypse Now “hollow at the core.” The message: Don’t listen to film critics. The dude who made those movies that some of them didn’t like that we now consider classics made this one too.

Also: The movie has Adam Driver holding a T-square ruler like it’s a broad sword. Watch the full trailer, film critic callouts and strange imagery and all.

READ MORE: The Worst Movies By Great Directors

Coppola isn’t the first filmmaker to call out his critics in movie marketing; David Lynch famously put Siskel & Ebert’s “Two thumbs down!” on the poster for Lost Highway. But it’s certainly an unusual tactic. But perhaps that’s what makes this trailer memorable.

Here is the film’s official synopsis:

MEGALOPOLIS is a Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.

Megalopolis is scheduled to open in theaters (including IMAX) on September 27.

UPDATE: According to Vulture, at least some of the quotes in this trailer are not accurate — or at least they cannot find their source. Pauline Kael, for example, was quite positive on The Godfather calling it “a bicentennial picture that doesn’t insult the intelligence. It’s an epic vision of the corruption of America.” Roger Ebert gave a positive review of Dracula and said it was “an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.”

Even when a critic disliked one of Coppola’s films — as Rex Reed did of Apocalypse Now — the quotes in the Megalopolis trailer don’t appear to come from their reviews. It remains to be seen where exactly these quotes came from and, if they were entirely fabricated, to what end.

UPDATE 2: Lionsgate pulled down the trailer, saying 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.  We are sorry.”