Lionsgate is recalling its newest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola‘s epic “Megalopolis,” which featured a littany of fabricated quotes from well-known movie critics.
“Lionsgate is instantly recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a Lionsgate spokesperson stated in an announcement supplied to Selection. “We provide our honest apologies to the critics concerned and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting course of. We screwed up. We’re sorry.”
The trailer, launched on Wednesday morning, aimed to place Coppola’s newest movie as a murals that might stand up to the check of time, very similar to his earlier masterpieces “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.”
The video included a number of quotes from critics panning Coppola’s earlier work — however not one of the phrases, attributed to the likes of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, may very well be present in any of their evaluations.
Selection‘s Owen Gleiberman was incorrectly cited as calling the 1992 movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” “a lovely mess” and highlighting its “absurdity” when he reviewed the movie for Leisure Weekly, the place he labored on the time of its launch.
“Even if you happen to’re a type of individuals who don’t like critics, we hardly need to have phrases put in our mouths. Then once more, the trivial scandal of all that is that the entire ‘Megalopolis’ trailer is constructed on a false narrative,” Gleiberman stated of the trailer’s falsified quotes. “Critics cherished ‘The Godfather.’ And although ‘Apocalypse Now’ was divisive, it obtained plenty of essential important assist. So far as me calling ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ ‘a lovely mess,’ I solely want I’d stated that! Concerning that movie, it now sounds form.”
It’s not clear the place a lot of the quotes featured within the trailer got here from — except for Roger Ebert’s remark, “a triumph of favor over substance,” which was really pulled from his 1989 evaluation of “Batman,” and never about “Dracula,” as indicated within the trailer.
The trailer snafu is the newest in a string of scandals befalling the $120 million manufacturing, which Coppola financed totally himself. Final month, Selection completely obtained video depicting Coppola making an attempt to kiss younger feminine extras on the set of the mission, as extra crew members detailed his unprofessional habits throughout manufacturing.
“Megalopolis” hits U.S. theaters on Sept. 27.