Lionsgate Deletes Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis Trailer After Unexpected Controversy

"Megalopolis," the upcoming movie from "The Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola, has been generating headlines as much for its behind-the-scenes drama as for the actual content of the movie itself. There have been reports of erratic behavior from Coppola throughout production, and videos obtained by Variety show the director trying to kiss young female extras during a nightclub scene. Now, Lionsgate has had to pull the latest trailer for "Megalopolis" and offer an apology.

Perhaps in response to the negative buzz surrounding "Megalopolis," the trailer opened with voiceover of Laurence Fishburne's narrator saying, "True genius is often misunderstood." It then winds back the clock to 1972 with a review of "The Godfather" by the Village Voice's Andrew Sarris, which calls it a "sloppy, self-indulgent movie." Another, attributed to the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, says the film is "diminished by its artsiness." A review for "Apocalypse Now" by National Review's John Simon calls it "a spectacular failure," while the Daily News' Rex Reed dismisses it as "an embarrassing piece of trash." A quote attributed to a Roger Ebert review of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" calls it "a triumph of style over substance." 

You get the idea — these movies were sneered at in their time but later recognized as genius. There's just one problem: the quotes are fake. Ebert's was actually taken from a review of Tim Burton's "Batman," and the rest are fabricated. After an article by Vulture pointed this out, Lionsgate pulled the trailer and released the following statement:

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.

The studio didn't explain how the error occurred, but there is one likely explanation.

After reading about the fake quotes and Lionsgate's immediate recall of the trailer, one thought came to mind: "I bet they used ChatGPT."

Launched in November 2022, OpenAI's virtual assistant ushered in a massive wave of hype and investment in artificial intelligence products. To read headlines at the time, you'd firmly believe that this was the dawn of true AI and that Skynet was just around the corner. Later, however, ChatGPT began to make headlines for less impressive reasons — specifically, its tendency to "hallucinate" (a.k.a. make stuff up). Fundamentally, this chatbot and others like it are designed to convincingly replicate human patterns of writing, not to tell the truth. This left several lawyers red-faced and slapped with fines when they used ChatGPT to write legal briefs, which cited fictional cases that the program had invented on the spot.

Now, if you did want to collect a bunch of negative quotes about Francis Ford Coppola movies but didn't want to do the legwork of looking up old reviews, you could use ChatGPT to do so. 

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However, like the quotes in the "Megalopolis" trailer, these phrases are nowhere to be found in the actual reviews. And that tiny disclaimer warning that "ChatGPT can make mistakes" at the bottom of the chat box is easy to miss.

If you'd like to read some real quotes from movie critics who saw "Megalopolis" at Cannes Film Festival, check out our early review round-up.