Lionsgate fires guy who generated those fake Megalopolis trailer quotes

There’s a certain kind of schadenfreude that kicks in only when you see something truly stupid happen in public view of the entire internet, think to yourself, “Welp, someone’s getting fired for that one,” and then, lo and behold, someone absolutely gets fired for that one. In this specific case, the “that one” in question has been the debacle surrounding a recent trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s debacle-friendly new film Megalopolis, as Lionsgate has now “parted ways” (to use Variety‘s very polite descriptor) with marketing consultant Eddie Egan. Egan was reportedly the mind behind the now-pulled trailer, which attempted to lay out a “Critics are always hard on Coppola, at first” narrative around his expensive new movie, by showing off quotes from influential critics about past masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now… which were entirely made up.

Now, Variety is also stating what we all kind of suspected: That the quotes in question, which included lines attributed to Pauline Kael (who adored The Godfather when it came out) saying that it was “diminished by its artsiness” were generated by A.I. (Lionsgate hasn’t directly confirmed this, but Variety was reportedly able to generate similar quotes from ChatGPT by asking it to grab negative quotes about Coppola’s work from well-known critics; also, a Lionsgate source says the studio failed to vet and fact-check the quotes they were given by Egan, which sure sounds like someone plugged a prompt into an A.I., grabbed whatever came out, and just assumed it was correct.)

Part of the irritation that accompanies this whole story, of course, comes down to the idea of a major studio employing the same level of rigor we typically see from middle school students trying to get away with not writing a book report to the marketing efforts for a huge release from an incredibly famous director; every even halfway-intelligent person in 2024 knows that, if using ChatGPT to get out of doing work is a major sin, trusting ChatGPT after using it to get out of doing work is the kind that gets you burning in “Whoops, I fucked up” hell forever. Archives still exist; film critics’ opinions are notoriously easy to find; do two hours of research the next time you want to sell your stupid “He’s a misunderstood genius, we promise” premise. This does not seem hard.