MEGALOPOLIS is a Roman Epic set in a reimagined Modern America. 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.

The new trailer opens with the line, “True genius is often misunderstood,” that works for both the film, and as a call-out to critics who first hated, then forever loved Coppola’s unique films like Apocalypse Now and The Godfather.

This, however, was all part of a promotional campaign gone wildly wrong. The quotes from the critics were things they never actually said. The screw-up was verified by Variety, In fact, nobody can figure out exactly where the quotes came from . For example, Ebert’s quote calling “Dracula” a “triumph of style over substance” is actually pulled from his 1989 review of “Batman.”

This is a black eye for Lionsgate, the film’s distributor. Either that, or one of the most clever viral ad campaigns in recent history. Either way, Lionsgate has pulled the trailer from their own YouTube channel, with third parties leaving the trailer up in absence of anything else to replace it with. That’s why the trailer below is listed on the IGN YouTube channel, and not Lionsgate’s own.

Variety‘s reviewer Owen Gleiberman is incorrectly cited as calling the 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” “a beautiful mess” and highlighting its “absurdity” when he reviewed the film for Entertainment Weekly, where he worked at that time of its release.

“Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths. Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole ‘Megalopolis’ trailer is built on a false narrative,” Gleiberman says of the trailer’s quotes. “Critics loved ‘The Godfather.’ And though ‘Apocalypse Now’ was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ ‘a beautiful mess,’ I only wish I’d said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind.”

The Megalopolis release is the culmination of a decades-long project from Coppola, who started working on the screenplay in the 1980s and kept updating it. He believes in the film to the tune of $120 million of his own money invested into it. He got every major star he wanted, and advanced visual effects in post-production. The film earned a seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, and Megalopolis landed a theatrical partner in Lionsgate, alongside a global commitment from Imax. Imax is the best place to see the stunning, huge, emotional visuals.

Asked about the state of the film industry at Cannes, Coppola said, “I fear that the film industry has become more of a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations because the studios are in great, great debt. And the job is not so much to make good movies, the job is to make sure they pay their debt obligations. Obviously, new companies like Amazon and Apple and Microsoft, they have plenty of money, so it might be that the studios we knew for so long, some wonderful ones, are not to be here in the future anymore.”

Coppola has a rare gift for making actors and effects equal partners in a scene. And for elevating a genre, this time alternate history science fiction. I predict MEGALOPOLIS will be one of the most talked about movies of the year, and years to come.

MEGALOPOLIS – the latest masterpiece from legendary Producer-Director Francis Ford Coppola is in theaters & IMAX September 27, 2024. It stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman.