MegaLOLpolis

Lionsgate Deletes Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis Trailer After Unexpected Controversy - SlashFilm

A trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has been pulled by Lionsgate after fake movie critic quotes caused controversy.

SlashFilmHannah Shaw-Williams

I've written about Megalopolis a number of times – almost for sure more than is warranted, but I can't help myself. The entire project has gone from disastrous to weird to problematic and back again. And with this news today, it's almost like they're trolling me:

Perhaps in response to the negative buzz surrounding "Megalopolis," the trailer opened with voiceover of Laurence Fishburne's narrator saying, "True genius is often misunderstood." It then winds back the clock to 1972 with a review of "The Godfather" by the Village Voice's Andrew Sarris, which calls it a "sloppy, self-indulgent movie." Another, attributed to the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, says the film is "diminished by its artsiness." A review for "Apocalypse Now" by National Review's John Simon calls it "a spectacular failure," while the Daily News' Rex Reed dismisses it as "an embarrassing piece of trash." A quote attributed to a Roger Ebert review of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" calls it "a triumph of style over substance."

You get the idea — these movies were sneered at in their time but later recognized as genius. There's just one problem: the quotes are fake. Ebert's was actually taken from a review of Tim Burton's "Batman," and the rest are fabricated. After an article by Vulture pointed this out, Lionsgate pulled the trailer...

Okay, but what happened? Well, it sure looks like this happened:

After reading about the fake quotes and Lionsgate's immediate recall of the trailer, one thought came to mind: "I bet they used ChatGPT."

Launched in November 2022, OpenAI's virtual assistant ushered in a massive wave of hype and investment in artificial intelligence products. To read headlines at the time, you'd firmly believe that this was the dawn of true AI and that Skynet was just around the corner. Later, however, ChatGPT began to make headlines for less impressive reasons — specifically, its tendency to "hallucinate" (a.k.a. make stuff up). Fundamentally, this chatbot and others like it are designed to convincingly replicate human patterns of writing, not to tell the truth. This left several lawyers red-faced and slapped with fines when they used ChatGPT to write legal briefs, which cited fictional cases that the program had invented on the spot.

Now, if you did want to collect a bunch of negative quotes about Francis Ford Coppola movies but didn't want to do the legwork of looking up old reviews, you could use ChatGPT to do so.

I shit you not. It sure looks like Lionsgate, in an attempt to dunk on would-be critics of Megalopolis, wanted to point out that some big time critics also dumped on the films that are now Coppola's classics. But to look this up, they used ChatGPT, and it just mixed and matched reviews from other movies. Like Batman. No one fact-checked this before they cut a trailer with these mixed-around reviews.

I thought movie reviews were dead anyway? Personally, I'm still waiting word if Megalopolis will get "Certified Hot" or just "Hot" or "Stale" on the 'Popcornmeter'.

And with that, all of my worlds have now officially converged and I think we can retire the Megalopolis coverage. At least until it opens and either totally bombs at the box office or does insanely well because it's now fully a meme. Just as Coppola intended.

While the official trailer was pulled, plenty of social media posts still have it live: