Following its recent debacle involving fabricated trailer quotes, Megalopolis has cut ties with marketing consultant Eddie Egan, sources have confirmed to Deadline.
Lionsgate declined comment. But we hear that the critic quotes featured in yesterday’s trailer for the Francis Ford Coppola epic, which were revealed by Vulture to be fake, were found to be AI-generated. They fell under the purview of Egan, a longtime associate of the studio, who has been working as an independent consultant since 2019.
In the immediate aftermath of the trailer snafu, some questioned whether Lionsgate purposefully highlighted fake quotes in a marketing ploy that kept the film in the headlines all day long. But this, we’re told, is far from the truth. Rather, this should be looked at as a cautionary tale, as neither Egan nor Lionsgate was out to intentionally fabricate quotes. Mistakes were simply made in the vetting of marketing materials.
If Egan’s involvement with Lionsgate’s Megalopolis campaign is over, whether he’ll be back in business with the studio again in the future is not yet clear.
It was early Wednesday morning that Lionsgate debuted its second trailer for Megalopolis, featuring a slew of past “criticisms” of Coppola’s now-iconic works, such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, by such famed critics as The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. In reference to The Godfather, for example, Kael was quoted as calling the film “diminished by its artsiness,” with Sarris referring to it as a “sloppy self-indulgent movie.”
The intention was to argue while Coppola’s Megalopolis was polarizing from the outset — as many of the filmmaker’s works have been — dividing critics in its premiere at Cannes, the film will ultimately stand the test of time as another classic. While it’s not clear who exactly gathered the AI quotes that wound up in the trailer, other critics cited included Roger Ebert, Vincent Canby, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, and Rex Reed.
When word began to spread that the quotes featured in the trailer were fabricated, Lionsgate made the highly unorthodox move of taking the trailer down from the web and issuing an apology. “Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” said a spokesperson for the studio. “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.”
The trailer debacle hasn’t been the only controversy Megalopolis has weathered en route to theaters, as Variety in July published a report on supposed unprofessional behavior from Coppola, along with a video that appeared to depict the director kissing extras on set. A week later, one of the women featured in the video, Rayna Menz, came forward to dispute our sister trade’s account of events, telling Deadline, “He did nothing to make me or for that matter anyone on set feel uncomfortable. I felt disgusted, I was blindsided by it because it was a closed set. That someone had video of that is just ridiculous and super unprofessional.”
Self-financed by Coppola at a budget north of $100M, Megalopolis is described as a Roman epic set in an imagined Modern America. In the film, the City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
Marking Coppola’s first feature outing since 2011’s Twixt, the film also stars Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman. Its producers include Barry Hirsch, Fred Roos, and Michael Bederman.
Lionsgate is set to release Megalopolis in U.S. theaters on September 27.
