“This quickly scuttled ad is built entirely around a defensive, anti-critic posture. The idea is basically Screw you, he’s Francis Ford Coppola. If you trust the critics who don’t like it, you’ll look foolish later. The trailer bolsters this argument with negative quotes from several critics on Coppola’s most beloved works, and also Dracula. The only problem was that none of these quotes actually appeared in those reviews. Their origins are either totally mysterious—Pauline Kael loved The Godfather!—or taken from other places, like Roger Ebert’s review of the Tim Burton Batman, which gets repurposed here as a Dracula pan.
While the absurdity of the fabricated quotes probably brought more attention to Megalopolis than traditional marketing, the speed with which the U.S. distributor Lionsgate apologized and tried to take it down suggests that this is neither a planned troll job nor a Dylanesque attempt to embody the themes of the film. Rather, the most likely explanation is that some idiot used ChatGPT as a search engine, it made up or misattributed these quotes, and nobody bothered to check them. That reflects terribly on the marketing team, but it’s also, honestly, a little bit funny to think of the Megalopolis gang as a football team convinced that they’re owning some imaginary haters with every touchdown.”
Can’t wait for this trainwreck.
