“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ,” a spokesperson for the studio said. “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.” and Coppola have endured a rough ride ever since the dystopian epic starring Adam Driver was panned by American buyers at a screening prior to its world premiere in Cannes, where it earned mixed reviews. Lionsgate acquired US rights to the film in the summer and, hoping for a critical reassessment of , began the trailer with a crawl of uncomplimentary quotations purportedly from unkind reviews of prior Coppola films that were subsequently reassessed as masterpieces, like Oscar winners and .
“True genius is often misunderstood,” intoned cast member Laurence Fishburne at the start of the trailer, cuing up what was positioned as a line from Pauline Kael’s 1972 review of in that said the Mafia epic was “Diminished by its artsiness”. A line attributed to Andrew Sarris of declared it “a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”. However neither phrase appears in the online version of those reviews.
Neither do Vincent Canby’s claim writing in in 1979 that the war film was “hollow at the core”, nor Roger Ebert’s assertion in 1992 that was ” a triumph of style over substance”. All four critics have since died. However the trailer also contained a fabricated quote from Owen Glieberman, who said on Wednesday that he never said was “a beautiful mess”.
It should be noted that some of these original reviews were at least in part unflattering, although broadly speaking the films earned immediate admiration from critics, too. The trailer was pulled by the studio and remains online through third parties. For the record, ’s Cannes review is .
first reported on the story, which has added to the general malaise surrounding the film. Coppola, who invested $120m of his own money into the film, has himself come under scrutiny for alleged questionable , a claim others from the production have . stars Driver as a driven architect who is locked in a battle with a mayor over the fate of a futuristic city.
The cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Voight. Lionsgate will open the film on September 27..
