Francis Ford Coppola’s “Metropolis” has had a rocky road to the big screen, and one can’t help but wonder how many more scandals there will be before it opens in the US on September 27. The latest drama comes courtesy of a host of fabricated review quotes in a new trailer produced by Lionsgate.
The film was poorly received at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (only 53% of critics on RT approved of it), and some crew members claimed that Coppola’s behavior on the set was unprofessional to say the least. These two missteps alone suggest that this self-financed $120 million production, starring Adam Driver and a host of other big-name actors, could be in trouble. a lot of
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On Wednesday morning, Lionsgate uploaded a new trailer for the film, giving still-hopeful (or just morbidly curious) moviegoers a treat. Sadly, the trailer also included a number of puzzling review quotes that highlighted how many of his “classics” had also been panned. Amid the mixed reception, that alone would have been a dangerous gamble, but we’ll admit it’s a compelling one that could generate some buzz. The problem is, most, if not all, of these quotes are either untrue or have been misrepresented.
Lionsgate has pulled the trailer from its official channel, but you can still watch it through other YouTube channels dedicated to the film. Here is part of Lionsgate’s statement via Variety: “Lionsgate is withdrawing the trailer for Metropolis effective immediately… We sincerely apologize to the critics involved, as well as Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope, for this inexcusable error in our review process. We screwed up. We’re sorry.”
Some of the top quotes include film critic legends like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, but the phrases highlighted in the trailer are not found in their respective film reviews. Even more interesting is that Ebert’s “form over content” quote actually comes from his 1989 review of Batman, not Dracula. At the time of writing, it’s unclear where most of the quotes came from or how they were “remixed” so badly, but some are already speculating that ChatGPT might have been used to obtain them, which wouldn’t surprise us given the nightmare world we’re currently living in.
The trailer is expected to go online again after the lines were cut from it and replaced with real reviews from real people about their films. You’d hope that the studio’s marketing team had better fact-checking skills, or just wouldn’t try to mislead potential moviegoers with information that could easily be proven false, but here we are.
