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 T.