Earlier today, the first trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was released online, giving the public a taste of the director’s first feature in over a decade following its polarizing premiere at the Cannes Festival in May. However, now Lionsgate, which is handling the upcoming 2024 movie’s distribution, is is pulling the trailer from theaters and online. The reason: it uses movie review quotes that were made up.
Let me provide some context first. If you missed seeing the Megalopolis trailer, it features negative pull quotes from reviews of some of Coppola’s past movies, including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Dracula. This was done to show how just because a movie is received poorly at the time of its initial release doesn’t mean it can’t become a classic years later. But as Vulture pointed out, the quotes used in the Megalopolis trailer aren’t actually from those reviews written back in the day by greats like Pauline Kale, Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert.
While it’s unclear where these quotes came from or why they were included in the preview rather than using actual portions from the reviews, Variety received the following statement from Lionsgate regarding its decision to pull the Megalopolis trailer, saying:
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Examples of these made-up quotes included Andrew Sarris calling The Godfather a “sloppy self-indulgent movie,” John Simon calling Apocalypse Now a “spectacular failure,” and Owen Gleiberman calling Dracula a “beautiful mess.” Weirdly, the one real quote comes from Robert Ebert saying that the aforementioned vampire movie was a “triumph of style over substance”… except that actually came from his review of 1989’s Batman. As of this writing, the Megalopolis trailer has indeed been pulled from Lionsgate’s official channels on YouTube, but it remains on various other channels that snatched it up following its drop this morning.
This is just the latest controversy tied to Megalopolis, which Francis Ford Coppola spent $120 million of his own money to fund. In December 2022, it was reported that the filmmaker fired most of the production’s visual effects team. Then this past July, video footage was released of Coppola trying to kiss multiple female extras back in summer 2023 during filming, and other crew members accused him of behaving unprofessionally. The movie, which stars actors like Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel and Aubrey Plaza, takes place in a fictional version of the United States and follows an architect feuding with the mayor of New Roe over how to rebuild the city after it’s ravaged by a deadly accident.
Megalopolis hits theaters on September 27. While we wait for more news about this piece of silver screen entertainment, read through our ranking of Francis Ford Coppola’s 10 best movies and what other upcoming sci-fi movies are lined up.