Megalopolis Trailer Pulled Amid Fake Quote Controversy

Lionsgate apologizes to Coppola for now-pulled 'Megalopolis' trailer

Director Francis Ford Coppola at the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. on March 27, 2022. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images/AFP hide caption Lionsgate, which is distributing Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming movie Megalopolis in the U.S., is apologizing for its latest promotional trailer. The studio pulled it down after it went up online on Wednesday. The film stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Coppola spent part of his fortune from his wine business to make the indie movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over the summer. Early reviews have been mixed, and to head off any naysayers, Lionsgate released the unusual trailer. "One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time," declares the trailer's narrator, Laurence Fishburne, who also stars in the film. "True genius is often misunderstood." Superimposed over title images from the films Apocalypse Now and The Godfather are quotes supposedly written by well-known film critics trashing his previous movies when they came out. "A sloppy, self-indulgent movie," reads a quote attributed to Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice. "Hollow at the core" reads another attributed to Vincent Canby of The New York Times. "Diminished by its artsiness," reads another attributed to Pauline Kael of The New Yorker. However, as first reported in Vulture, all these quotes appear to have been fabricated. Online searches of old film reviews came up negative, and some of the critics who are still alive say those aren't their words. Some suggested the quotes may have been from reviews of entirely different movies or possibly generated by AI. "Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw?" wrote Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri. "Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be? After the outcry, Lionsgate immediately recalled the trailer and sent out 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."

Studio Pulls 'Megalopolis' Trailer Featuring Fake Review Quotes

To promote Francis Ford Coppola's epic, the spot used supposed lines from The Times, The New Yorker and others to suggest critics were wrong about him. A new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" featuring fake negative quotes from film critics has been pulled by the movie's distributor, Lionsgate, a spokesman for the company told the Times on Wednesday. The trailer, which was posted in the morning, featured quotes from well-known film critics of the past including Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, Vincent Canby of The New York Times and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times panning previous Coppola films like "The Godfather," "Apocalypse Now" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula." However, as the critic Bilge Ebiri first reported in Vulture, the quotes are not real. The trailer has now been pulled from YouTube, after amassing more than 1.3 million views in the single day it was online. "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for 'Megalopolis,'" a spokesman for the company said in a statement to The Times. "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." "Megalopolis," which was self-financed by Coppola and is due in theaters Sept. 27, was initially unable to find a buyer until Lionsgate stepped in. The epic fantasy premiered to a decidedly mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival. On Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at just 53 percent fresh among critics. The trailer seemed to be an effort to show that reviews don't always get it right when it comes to Coppola's work. The spot quoted Kael as saying "The Godfather" was "diminished by its artsiness," when in reality she wrote about it glowingly. While Canby, who served as senior film critic at The New York Times from 1969 to 1993, wasn't a fan of "Apocalypse Now," calling it an "intellectual muddle," he didn't use the phrase "hollow at the core" as the trailer indicates. The trailer also featured fake quotes from Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and Rex Reed in The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, according to the Vulture report. John Simon of National Review is also included in the spot, and a writer for the magazine posted on X that the staff was checking the archive but believed it to be false. It is unclear how the faked quotes were created. Some on social media, speculating that artificial intelligence tools were used, started feeding prompts to ChatGPT looking for similar results. Lionsgate would not comment on whether ChatGPT or other tools powered by artificial intelligence were used for the trailer.

Studio Pulls 'Megalopolis' Trailer Using Fake Quotes From Famed Movie Critics

The buzz around Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming film just got a whole lot weirder. While cinephiles were veritably salivating to see his polarizing new epic "Megalopolis," Coppola was accused earlier this year of trying to kiss his extras -- and is now seeing his latest trailer yanked for featuring fake or misattributed quotes from long-dead movie critics. Lionsgate apologized on Wednesday and said it was pulling the trailer it had released. "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis," the studio told multiple outlets 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," the statement continued plainly. "We are sorry." The trailer footage begins by quoting unfavorable reviews of Coppola's past films, presumably to paint the director as a misunderstood genius. The problem is, the quotes themselves are either fake, or are real quotes taken wildly out of context. A quote attributed to Andrew Sarris from "The Village Voice" calling "The Godfather" a "sloppy, self-indulgent movie" does not exist, for instance, and Vincent Canby never said "Apocalypse Now" was "hollow at the core" in his New York Times review of the war movie. The trailer also featured fake quotes from film critics Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, falsely suggesting Kael slammed "The Godfather" as "diminished by its artsiness" and that Ebert called "Dracula" a "triumph of style over substance." Kael actually asserted the opposite in her 1972 "New Yorker" critique of "The Godfather," writing at the time: "If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it." Ebert noted in his three-star Chicago Sun-Times review of "Dracula" that the 1992 film "is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it." While Coppola has yet to provide an explanation for the false quotes from the now-deceased critics, entertainment news outlet Consequence reported on Wednesday that a Chat GPT prompt to "collect negative reviews of Coppola classics" spurred a flurry of fake quotes. Whether Lionsgate actually relied on AI to market the film remains unclear; the studio did not reply to HuffPost's request for comment. "Megalopolis" is set to hit theaters on Sept. 27 and features a star-studded cast including Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman. While the film premiered at Cannes to mixed reviews, Coppola is facing the fallout from May's misconduct allegations. "I was in shock," Lauren Pagone, one of the extras who said Coppola kissed her without asking, told Variety earlier this month. "I didn't expect him to kiss and hug me like that. I was caught off guard. And I can tell you he came around a couple of times."

Megalopolis Trailer Pulled Offline After Quotes Criticizing Francis Ford Coppola Are Discovered to Be Fake - IGN

Pauline Kael loved The Godfather, actually (and so did most critics). A new trailer for Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's decades-in-the-making passion project, takes a no-holds-barred approach to calling out critics who slammed the filmmaker's previous works. "True genius," the narration at the top of the trailer says, "is often misunderstood." What follows is a parade of negative quotes attributed to some of the industry's most famous movie critics bashing The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's intriguing marketing to be sure, and sets up Megalopolis to be essentially critic-proof; how can you believe the negative reviews of Megalopolis when they got it so wrong on so many other movies? There's just, uh, one problem. As first spotted and verified by Vulture, just about every quote in the trailer seems to be misattributed at best, and completely fabricated at worst. After this was discovered, Lionsgate issued the following statement to Variety, apologizing and confirming that the trailer was being pulled: "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." As Vulture points out, one of the critics most prominently featured in the since-pulled trailer, The New Yorker's Pauline Keal (a critic so famous that she was rumored to be the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's scrapped film The Movie Critic), is quoted as saying The Godfather was "diminished by its artsiness." For one thing, Google doesn't even have record of anyone using that phrase before today. But secondly and most importantly: Keal loved The Godfather and its sequel, and that phrase is nowhere to be found in her glowing reviews of either movie. It only gets weirder from there. While The Voice's Andrew Sarris was less effusive on The Godfather, he didn't say that it "doesn't know what it wants to be," as the trailer claimed. Even when the trailer was seemingly correct on the overall critic's sentiment, as is the case with Daily News' Rex Reed and Apocalypse Now, the words attributed - in Reed's case, "an epic piece of trash" - aren't in their review. According to Variety, a quote from the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert calling Bram Stoker's Dracula "a triumph of style over substance" is actually from Ebert's 1989 review of Batman. In fact, going by each quote, we at IGN couldn't find a single one that is correctly attributed to the critic listed. It's caused some to speculate that some of the quotes might've been generated by AI. What's worse, most of the critics quoted - Keal, Ebert, Sarris, John Simon, Stanley Kauffman, and Vincent Canby - have passed away, so it's not like they could clear their name themselves. One of the critics quoted who is still alive, Variety's Owen Gleiberman, spoke out about it in Variety's report: "Even if you're one of those people who don't like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths. Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole Megalopolis trailer is built on a false narrative," Gleiberman said. "Critics loved The Godfather. And though Apocalypse Now was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling Bram Stoker's Dracula 'a beautiful mess,' I only wish I'd said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind." Meanwhile, Megalopolis is still to hit U.S. theaters on September 27, 2024. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to, indeed, mixed reviews, although we gave it a 9/10, with Siddhant Adlakha writing, "Megalopolis is, for better and worse, a profoundly personal vision, whose wordy metaphors eventually give way to jaw-dropping transformations."

Trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's new movie pulled over 'fake quotes'

Social media rumours suggest artificial intelligence used for film clip The trailer for a new film made by Francis Ford Coppola has been pulled over claims it included fake quotes. Lionsgate, the movie's distributor, was forced to withdraw the trailer for Megalopolis amid allegations it included made-up verdicts from reviewers. Released on Wednesday, the trailer showed quotes from negative film reviews for the 85-year-old director's former big hitters, including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Meanwhile, the narrator can be heard saying: "Genius is often misunderstood." But several of the quotes used in the trailer could not be found in the original reviews, according to entertainment website Vulture. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael was purported to have said The Godfather was "diminished by its artsiness" but the comment was not found in her positive reviews of the first two films. Village Voice's Andrew Sarris did not like The Godfather but did not describe it as "a sloppy, self-indulgent movie" as the trailer claimed he had. Daily News critic Rex Reed did not use the phrase "an epic piece of trash" to describe Apocalypse Now in his reviews of the film. The trailer also alleged Roger Ebert said Bram Stoker's Dracula is "a triumph of style over substance" but the comment could not be found in his positive review. Lionsgate said it was "immediately recalling" the trailer, which had amassed more than 1.3 million YouTube views in less than 24 hours. "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. "We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope [the production company] for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry." Megalopolis, which was bought by Lionsgate for US distribution, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to mixed reviews. The Roman-inspired film starring Adam Driver, which is said to have boasted a $120million budget funded by Mr Coppola, currently has a rating of 53 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, the US review website. Megalopolis is set to be released on Sept 27. It follows a muddled struggle for power among the elites of New Rome, a parallel version of modern-day New York City. Some people on social media speculated artificial intelligence tools could have been used as part of the process for making the trailer, allegations Lionsgate has not responded to. The Telegraph has contacted Lionsgate for comment.

"Megalopolis" Trailer Pulled After Revelation That Its "Critic Quotes" Were AI-Generated Fakes

A trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming sci-fi epic "Megalopolis" was pulled by distributors after it was called out for featuring made-up quotes from famous film critics, Variety reports. In a subversion of the plaudits that trailers usually cram in, the "Megalopolis" one painted Coppola -- one of the most celebrated American filmmakers of all-time -- as a "misunderstood" genius by showing us a wry Greatest Hits of critics panning his now legendary movies when they were first released, like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now." Except few, if any, of the negative quotes attributed to the likes of The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and The Village Voice's Andrew Sarris were real. Bilge Ebiri first called out the fake quotes at Vulture on Wednesday, and in the chaos that ensued, many noted that ChatGPT -- or a similar large language model -- appears to be the source of the quotes, in what is one of the more embarrassing debacles caused by AI hallucinations. Kael, for example, is quoted in the trailer as admonishing "The Godfather" for being "diminished by its artsiness." Not only did she never say that, Ebiri notes, but Kael was in reality a major admirer of the movie and wrote it a glowing review. Internet sleuths who prompted ChatGPT to cook up negative quotes about "The Godfather" and Coppola's other movies found that the chatbot returned similar sounding fake-reviews, claiming in one case that Kael called the gangster epic "almost comic in its heavy-handedness." Based on those findings and our own testing, it appears that simply asking for a negative quote is enough for ChatGPT to fabricate history and attribute whatever it makes up to any critic, regardless of what they actually said. Telling the chatbot that the quotes aren't real causes it to try amend the error by offering up more fake quotes. How did a major distributor, Lionsgate, let this happen? Some speculate that a marketer set on the "critics-were-wrong" shtick simply asked ChatGPT for negative reviews of Coppola's movies to avoid doing the legwork of poring over old newspapers and magazines -- and then never bothered to check the responses it confidently coughed up. The trailer has now been removed from YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere, where it amassed millions of views prior to being taken down. "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," Lionsgate, which is distributing the film in the US, told Variety. "We screwed up. We are sorry." Screwed up is right. As the refrain for our AI age goes, ChatGPT is not a search engine -- nor is any other LLM -- and it can easily be a spreader of misinformation, as this episode and others have shown. This doesn't augur well for "Megalopolis," which has already proved divisive with critics. But Coppola has been here before: "Apocalypse Now" was once anticipated to be his next great opus, which also had a potentially ruinous budget with his own money on the line, and a controversial production to top things off. Unlike the Vietnam picture, though, "Megalopolis" didn't manage to bag a Palme d'Or when it premiered at Cannes. It also didn't have a dumb chatbot sabotaging its marketing campaign. The horror.