Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million passion project, continues to have a chaotic rollout.
Lionsgate yanked its new trailer for the film, starring Adam Driver as an architect who wants to rebuild a utopian version of New York following a disaster, because it featured fabricated quotes from film critics.
What just happened?
The movie studio released the latest trailer for The Godfather director’s epic on Aug. 21 and then swiftly pulled it due to it containing made-up movie review quotes. An apology followed.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement. “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.”
In addition to giving glimpses of Megalopolis footage, the now deleted trailer surfaced supposed quotes from famous critics who had seemingly panned some of Coppola’s past projects, including Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The idea was that Megalopolis, which Coppola self-funded and has wanted to make since the 1980s, may be remembered as another one of his best projects, despite early mixed reactions.
Laurence Fishburne provided the voiceover, saying, “True genius is often misunderstood. One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time.” (You can still watch the trailer here.)
However, it quickly became evident that the quotes attributed to famous critics — including the late Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael and Rex Reed — never appeared in their reviews. The only one that did — Ebert’s comment calling Dracula “a triumph of … style over substance” — was actually pulled from his review of Batman.
Mixed reviews for ‘Megalopolis’
When Megalopolis — also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf and Fishburne — debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the response was chaotic, Yahoo Entertainment reported at the time. Some critics called the dystopian storyline “overstuffed,” “juicy and weird” and “a work of absolute madness,” while “others concede that ‘while it should never have been made,’ ‘we should be so grateful that it exists.’”
Megalopolis, which Coppola also wrote and produced, is currently rated “Rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, with a score of 53%.
The film will have its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September and then be released on Sept. 27.
Drama around ‘Megalopolis’
The trailer being recalled is the latest in a series of controversies swirling around the big-budget film.
Most notably, the 85-year-old filmmaker was accused of behaving inappropriately toward female extras while filming a nightclub sequence. He allegedly pulled women to sit on his lap and “tried to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras,” according to the Guardian.
However, Darren Demetre, one of the film’s executive producers, defended the director and denied that there were any harassment complaints. A female extra who was there called the reports “misleading.”
The Guardian also reported complaints about Coppola sitting in his trailer “for hours on end” and employing “old-school” film techniques that made shooting take longer. One crew member reportedly told the outlet that working on the film “was like watching a train wreck unfold day after day, week after week.”
Coppola told Vanity Fair he rewrote the script about 300 times before self-financing the film by selling part of his Northern California winery estate. When asked about the cost at Cannes, he said, “The money doesn’t matter” and he has “no problems with the financials.”
As part of the deal with Lionsgate, Coppola is paying for the film’s marketing costs, according to Variety, which will now include a new trailer.
