Lionsgate has parted ways with marketing consultant Eddie Egan after the Megalopolis fake quotes trailer fiasco, which it has emerged involved AI-generated content.
The studio would not comment on Friday’s developments, which came two days after it pulled a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian epic when it became apparent the marketing asset contained fake quotes attributed to famous critics.
Sources confirmed that Egan compiled a document of snippets of reviews that he and the studio believed were taken from film criticism of Coppola’s early work dating back to the early 1970s.
Somehow AI-generated content was involved and misled the parties. Sources said neither Egan nor Lionsgate meant to fabricate quotes and were fooled by what they thought were genuine excerpts of reviews.
However Lionsgate admitted it did not properly vet the materials, and on Wednesday it took responsibility for that when it withdrew the second trailer to Megalolopis and apologised.
The aim of the campaign was to remind audiences that, in light of lukewarm reviews for Megalopolis after its Cannes premiere, some of Coppola’s most acclaimed works like Apocalypse Now and The Godfather initially earned a cold reception from critics.
The trailer ran quotes purportedly from the late Pauline Kael writing in The New Yorker that said The Godfather was “Diminished by its artsiness”, when in fact Kael gave the Mafia epic a good review. A line attributed to the late Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice declared Apocalypse Now “a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”.
The phrases did not tally with the online versions of the original reviews and others cited in the trailer.
On Wednesday Lionsgate 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.”
Megalopolis stars Adam 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.
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