Lionsgate has pulled its latest trailer for director Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis after it was revealed that a lot of the quotes bashing the film were fabricated.
There was a bit of controversy over the fake critic quotes, and Lionsgate released the following statement apologizing for screwing up:
“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 quotes featured in the Megalopolis trailer included previous ‘criticisms’ of Coppola’s now-iconic works, such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. One says The Godfather is “diminished by its artsiness,” and another refers to it as a “sloppy self-indulgent movie.”
The whole point of this was to highlight to the polarizing criticism of Coppola’s work and how a film like Megalopolis will ultimately stand the test of time and become a classic like many of Coppola’s other films.
I get the whole angle they are taking with the marketing for the film, but it’s weird that they decided to fabricate many of the quotes.
Regardless, this whole quote controversy thing also makes for some good marketing for the film.
The film stars Adam Driver, and it tells an intriguing story of an architect dreaming of a utopian version of New York City in the near future and his battle with the conservative mayor, who has other ideas about the city.
Contained within the epic is a myriad of storylines and characters. “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition.”
Coppola described the film as “a love story. A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle.
“One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view.
“The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
Coppola also talked about the film and his goal with it, saying: “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life.”
He explained: “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
The filmmaker added: “I believe in America. Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
The cast for the film also includes Shia LaBeouf, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, James Remar, Talia Shire. Dustin Hoffman, Chloe Fineman (Saturday Night Live), Isabelle Kusman (Licorice Pizza), D.B. Sweeney (Fire in the Sky), Bailey Ives, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Lionsgate will release the movie on September 27th, 2024.
