Image: Lionsgate
Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola's sci-fi passion project Megalopolis continues to be one of Hollywood's biggest flops, with its latest derailment coming when its trailer was pulled due to fabricated dialogue that, shockingly, was reportedly generated by AI.
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Where do I begin with Megalopolis? Simply put, it's a thought-provoking, big-budget arthouse film about an architect facing an existential crisis in a futuristic city, with a diverse, all-star cast led by Adam Driver. Coppola had apparently wanted to make this movie for decades, even selling part of his winery to fund the $120 million production. It has received mixed reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and Coppola has been accused of inappropriate behavior on set, including a video of him kissing a female extra.
Then this week, a trailer was released in which a famous film critic slammed Coppola's previous work, including Bram Stoker's Dracula. “It's devalued by artifice,” a quote purportedly from The New Yorker's Pauline Kael about The Godfather flashed on screen, underscoring that recent negative press coverage of Megalopolis is similarly false. The only problem is that Kael never wrote it; Variety now reports that a generative AI wrote it.
“Variety's sources say that Lionsgate or Egan did not fabricate the quotes, but rather made a mistake in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by consultants,” the report read. “AI appears to have been used to generate the fake quotes from critics.”
Lionsgate has not commented on the allegations, but has disassociated itself from marketing consultant Eddie Egan, who has been held responsible for the embarrassing controversy. “Lionsgate is immediately withdrawing the trailer for Megalopolis,” the film's distributor announced earlier this week. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved, Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this unforgivable error in our review process. We failed. We are sorry.”
Megalopolis hits theaters on September 27th and I'm morbidly curious to see it.
