The trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has been removed by Lionsgate because the clip contains fabricated quotes from real film critics about the filmmaker’s previous works.
The studio responsible for distributing the film in the United States has apologized to critics and Mr. Coppola “for this unforgivable error in our due diligence.”
“We made a mistake,” Lionsgate said in a statement on Wednesday.
Megalopolis, which Mr. Coppola financed himself, received mixed reviews at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The now-removed trailer may have been a play on that lukewarm reception, attempting to show that critics aren’t always the best judges by going back in time to give negative reviews to Coppola’s previous films. “Genius is often misunderstood,” Megalopolis co-star Laurence Fishburne says in a voiceover.
But those negative reviews are fabricated.
The ad quoted critic Pauline Kael as saying The Godfather was “artistically diluted” while her actual review was entirely positive.
Likewise, critic Rex Reed’s explicit criticism of Apocalypse Now—”a monumental piece of trash”—is fabricated.
And the late Roger Ebert’s supposedly insulting criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — “The triumph of style over substance” — appears to have been lifted from his review of another film by another director, Tim Burton’s Batman.
It is unclear how these quotes were created.
The trailer has reached over 1.3 million views in just one day after being posted online.
The sci-fi epic, which stars Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza and Nathalie Emmanuel, cost Mr Coppola a reported $120 million (£91.6 million).
In his review, The BBC’s Nicholas Barber called it “a bombastic, disturbing curiosity”like someone is remembering a “crazy dream”.
The film is scheduled to hit theaters in the US on September 27.
The production was hit by another controversy in May after Variety obtained footage of Mr Coppola in a nightclub scene on the set of Megalopolis last year, appearing to try to kiss female extras. Sources told the Guardian that the director had been known to behave inappropriately towards women on the set.
Mr. Coppola has denied the allegations, telling The New York Times in June: “I’m not a sensitive person. I’m too shy.”
