Wait, did the ‘Megalopolis’ trailer just ChatGPT these critic reviews?

Following polarized reactions out of the Cannes Film Festival, the first trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis‘ was released recently, giving us a closer look at what to expect. Well, it seems like the trailer is drawing attention for all the wrong reasons, as fans have pointed out a massive inconsistency with it.

Megalopolis‘ trailer begins with the narrator exclaiming, “True genius is often misunderstood” before breaking into a montage of critic reviews attached to Coppola’s earlier masterpieces, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. These reviews appear to be negative and have names of some all-time critics like Pauline Kael attached to them. The marketing tactic’s objective is to hype the film while highlighting how polarizing the reviews have been so far and how the director’s earlier works established themselves as cult classics despite initially poor responses from critics.

However, the marketing team has fallen flat in that initiative because it turns out these quotes attributed to the popular critics are fake. What’s worse is that this is possibly a result of an AI chatbot search gone wrong, with the prompt likely being “negative Coppola review quotes.” For instance, the quotes attributed to Kael’s review of the first two Godfather films are completely false. Contrary to hating it, she sang the praises of the first two movies in the series.

The same goes for Andrew Sarris, who, like Kael, is a celebrated name in the film fraternity. As per the trailer, Sarris called The Godfather a “sloppy, self-indulgent movie,” which doesn’t appear to be the case at all. Vincent Canby’s quote on Apocalypse Now and Roger Ebert’s comment on Bram Stoker’s Dracula are two other examples of this inconsistency, and judging by the pattern, this can be applied to the other reviews as well.

There hasn’t been a comment from Coppola’s camp or the marketing team regarding this possible gaffe. If this debacle was unintentional, then it goes down as an extremely unprofessional act related to a major film release. Contrarily, if the gimmick was indeed a planned affair, then it is extremely difficult to understand the intention behind it.