Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Pulled Due to Faked Critic Quotes

Producer Lionsgate apologized and acknowledged having “made a mistake” in a statement sent to the American magazine “Variety”.

“Lionsgate immediately removes our trailer from Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement sent to Variety Wednesday, August 21. The trailer released Wednesday morning for Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, Megalopolisin theaters September 25, included several erroneous quotes from critics. Explanations.

“True genius is often misunderstood“, we hear at the beginning of the removed trailer, before several previous Coppola feature films are cited, to which are attached false negative reviews from certain media. The Godfather from 1972 would be for example “a sloppy film that doesn’t hold back on anything“, And Apocalypse Now (from 1979) “a spectacular failure“. As we then see Adam Driver ready to throw himself into the void at the edge of a building, the voiceover announces: “There is a filmmaker who has always been ahead of his time“A way for Francis Ford Coppola to silence the critics by presenting himself as an avant-garde.

In the trailer, the critics are named directly. We see the name of Pauline Kael qualifying The Godfather of “diminished by its artistic side” in the New Yorker or Andrew Sarris finding the film “sloppy and complacent” In The Village Voice. None of these sentences could be found in their reviews.

“We sincerely apologize to the critics involved, as well as to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope, for this inexcusable error in our selection process. We made a mistake. We are sorry.”details the press release.

“Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like criticism, we don’t deserve to have words put in our mouths. But the trivial scandal of all this is that the entire trailer for Megalopolis is based on a false narrative” said the critic of Variety Owen Gleiberman on the fake trailer quotes.

The movie Megalopolis had not at all convinced the critics during its screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17. The Guardian had called the film “mega-boring“.

The titanic project, with a budget of 120 million dollars (108 million euros), tells an epic story in New Rome, an exact copy of a futuristic New York, in which Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) are in conflict over the future of the city.