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 aren’t in their review, like Reed supposedly calling it an “epic piece of trash.” 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.
this may be right (after a brief fact-check, Ebert never said this btw) https://t.co/Gur9IMweXS pic.twitter.com/XcUnikYE1l
— Maxance Vincent (@MaxFromQuebec) August 21, 2024
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.”
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
