Lionsgate fires consultant over fake Coppola review flap; AI possibly used to generate phony reviews

Variety is reporting Lionsgate has dropped Eddie Egan, the marketing consultant reportedly behind a scuttled campaign that used fake reviews from real critics in an effort to promote Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis.

As reported, a now-deleted trailer used phony negative review quotes for Coppola classics including The Godfather and Apocalypse Now in the promo for Megalopolis, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May to some real-life negative reviews.

Sources tell Variety it wasn’t Lionsgate or Egan’s “intention to fabricate quotes,” but “an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant.”

That said, the trade prompted Chat GPT to write negative reviews of Coppola films in the style of popular reviewers and the “results were strikingly similar” to the ones seen in the trailer, so it appears an AI program was used to create them.

Lionsgate pulled the trailer on Wednesday, the day it debuted, saying, “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and [Coppola’s studio] American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”

Lionsgate will release Megalopolis in theaters on Sept. 27.

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