LogIn"We screwed up."
Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, distributed by Lionsgate, is coming to big screens in September, but the Cannes Film Festival has already seen it, and the reception was lukewarm: only 53% of 69 critics' reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, while Metacritic's score stopped at 59.
Lionsgate's marketing consultant Eddie Egan decided to turn this unfortunate situation into a promo campaign, but it didn't go as planned.
Egan suggested adding critics' responses to Coppola's famous films, including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, to a new trailer, trying to say that even such classics had their dose of negative reviews.
The plan might have worked out if the reviews were real. It turned out that at least some of the quotes from critics were fabricated. Vulture investigated the problem and found out that the lines from Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, and Roger Ebert don't appear in their reviews. Sarris didn't call The Godfather "a sloppy, self-indulgent movie," Canby didn't say Apocalypse Now was "hollow at the core," and Ebert didn't think Dracula was "a triumph of style over substance."
Lionsgate had to take the trailer down and issue an apology for not fact-checking the reviews. Moreover, Egan, who has worked with the chair of Lionsgate's film group, Adam Fogelson, for over 20 years, has been dismissed.
"Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis," the company said (via Variety). "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."
Lionsgate
So how did Egan come up with these non-existent quotes? Variety asked ChatGPT to provide negative criticism about Megalopolis from well-known reviewers, and the responses were "strikingly similar to the quotes included in the trailer." So it seems AI had a role in this mess, which should remind you never to trust its information without doing some research – AI is known for hallucinating, after all.
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