Earlier today, Lionsgate unveiled their trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. In a bold tactic, the trailer opened with negative quotes from film critics’ reviews of past Coppola classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The suggestion: Even though Megalopolis got mixed reviews at its Cannes premiere, those snoody know-it-all critics bashed this genius’ movies before, and they were wrong then too.
There was just one problem. The quotes from film critics bashing old Coppola movies weren’t accurate. They were entirely made up. And they were attributed to some of the most respected (and Google-able!) critics in history.
After several journalists began questioning the source of these critic quotes — the one from Pauline Kael about The Godfather, for example, does not appear in her positive review of that movie — Lionsgate pulled the trailer down entirely. In a statement to Variety they said…
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.
While the official trailer was pulled down, you can still find and watchother examples of it online.
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As screwups go, this is a pretty substantial one. You don’t see trailers get pulled down too often, and in this case they were pulled down for gross factual errors — putting words into the mouths of critics that they apparently never said or wrote. The question is … how did the trailer get so far without someone doing even a cursory fact check to verify that these quotes were accurate?
One would assume a trailer of this magnitude — for a movie from a director as important as Coppola — goes through many different versions, and perhaps even multiple levels of approval, before it’s finalized. Yet it doesn’t look like any of the quotes in the Megalopolis trailer were accurate. And while a couple were at least close to the spirit of the critics’ reviews — Rex Reed didn’t love Apocalypse Now, even if he didn’t call it “an epic piece of trash” — some were completely off base. How do you take Kael actually calling The Godfather “an epic vision of the corruption of America” in The New Yorker and turn it into a quote about how the film is “diminished by its artiness”?
The quotes weren’t just a throwaway bit, either. They were the main thrust of the first part of the trailer. The whole point of the trailer was saying film critics don’t know what they talking about, so don’t let them talk you out of seeing this movie. But the whole basis for the trailer’s entire sales pitch was incorrect! Which seems … not great?
Regardless, Megalopolis is scheduled to open in theaters on September 27. Now I can’t wait to read what film critics write about it.
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