Why That 'Megalopolis' Trailer Failed Even Before the Fake Quotes

A brief study of selling a difficult movie.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis will not be an easy sell. It’s not based on pre-existing material, and Coppola, while the filmmaker behind such all-time classics as The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, does not loom large in the mind of the modern audience like Christopher Nolan or Jordan Peele because Coppola hasn’t made a hit movie in quite some time. There are a bunch of name actors in the cast, but you need more than names these days to make a hit. Critical reception out of Cannes was mixed, and major studios were reluctant to take a gamble on the movie.

So I don’t envy Lionsgate in trying to market this movie. But this new trailer was not the way to do it.

Those negative quotes from famous critics? Yeah, they’re fake. Whether someone prompted ChatGPT for negative quotes without checking (AI confidently giving incorrect information? Will wonders never cease) or simply made them up out of whole cloth, it’s a black eye for the marketing campaign to where Lionsgate pulled the trailer and apologized. But even if the quotes had been real, this would have been the wrong approach.