We have our first casualty of the controversy over the use of fake film critic quotes in the first trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — ones that appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Variety is reporting that Lionsgate has cut ties with Eddie Egan, a veteran marketing consultant, in the wake of the scandal and that the made-up quotes were most likely created by an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. Variety even prompted ChatGPT to give them negative review quotes of Coppola’s films “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” and claimed the results were strikingly similar to what was seen in the trailer. Puck’s Matt Belloni also reported that Lionsgate cut ties with Egan.
However, Egan and Lionsgate didn’t intend to make up quotes, a source told IndieWire, but the source material of the quotes wasn’t properly fact checked or vetted. The idea of the campaign was to show that Coppola’s films have been misunderstood and “ahead of their time” even dating back to his ’70s masterpieces. “Megalopolis” currently has a very mixed 59 out of 100 on Metacritic, with some critics loving it and others hating it, and the campaign clearly wanted to lean into the negativity.
Egan did not respond to IndieWire’s request for comment. A rep for Lionsgate declined to comment.
On Wednesday, Lionsgate pulled the trailer for Coppola’s upcoming epic after it was discovered that quotes from legendary film critics such as Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris panning classics like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” didn’t actually come from their real movie reviews. Many of the critics in question were even big fans of some of the films at the time.
On Wednesday after Lionsgate pulled the trailer, it apologized to Coppola and took the blame for the mix-up. “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,” a spokesperson said.
Egan, a long time marketing executive who spent 19 years at Universal and also worked at Illumination and STXfilms, more recently has worked as an independent consultant and has participated in campaigns for films like “Into the Woods,” “Bridge of Spies,” and “The Edge of Seventeen.”
Lionsgate is handling the distribution of “Megalopolis” in the U.S. and has planned a theatrical and IMAX release for September 27. Coppola however is handling the cost of the marketing and brought in Utopia, run by his nephew Robert Schwartzman, to provide “alternative marketing services” on the film.
