This week, Lionsgate released and then promptly pulled a daring trailer for “Megalopolis,” an ugly but undeniably ambitious late-career monstrosity from Francis Ford Coppola.

Typically, trailers are chock-full of exaggerated quotes from credible critics—we call them “quote whores”—taken out of context and accompanied by exclamation points (a punctuation mark rarely, if ever, used by critics in print but ubiquitous in movie advertising).

“A thrilling ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat!” (“Any given Sunday”)

“The best western since ‘Unforgiven’!” (“3:10 to Yuma,” “Hostiles,” or “Bone Tomahawk,” depending on who you ask)

“Two thumbs up!” (professional enthusiasts Siskel and Ebert on more films than you can count)

In the case of Megalopolis, the marketing team tried a different strategy. Instead of citing reviews from the Cannes Film Festival (where critics were universally disappointed, with a few benevolent exceptions who bent over backwards to say something positive about the film), Lionsgate lied.

Whoever supervised this trailer seemed to assume you’d already heard that Megalopolis was a disaster, so they set out to discredit the critics… by inventing negative reviews of previous Coppola triumphs. The trailer quotes Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael sneering at The Godfather, and references pannings of John Simon and Rex Reed’s Apocalypse Now to bolster the argument that the critics were wrong about those films.

“A filmmaker was always ahead of his time,” says a voice that sounds like Laurence Fishburne.

There’s just one problem: The bad words in the trailer aren’t from those critics — which isn’t to say they haven’t been harsh on these films. Rex Reed ripped Apocalypse Now to pieces, calling it “a mess of pretentious blather,” while John Powers complained, “There’s no jewel in the box of his genius, not even a peach pit, just fumes.” (Sarris and Kael were disparaging in their review of The Godfather, which, according to their critics, was evidently almost pre-consecrated when they reviewed it in 1972. But they appreciated its genius nonetheless.)

So what happened here? If the trailer could have said the same thing with real quotes, why did it make them up? I have a hunch: This reminds me of what happens when lazy students use ChatGPT for their homework. Let’s say the writer of this trailer knew that these movies had been panned in their day, but didn’t have the time to go to the local library (or the means to find the actual reviews online).

Ask an AI assistant to find them for you, and the algorithm will do what any good language model is supposed to do: It will generate something that sounds plausible. To test the theory, I asked ChatGPT: “What were the meanest things movie critics have said about the movies ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’?”

This is what came out:

Although The Godfather is widely considered one of the best films of all time, some critics were initially less than enthusiastic. Here are some of the harshest criticisms:
Pauline Kael (The New Yorker):
• Kael, although a fan of Coppola in general, had mixed feelings about The Godfather. She described it as “a long, slow, monotonous story,” criticized the pacing, and said the film was more focused on its own grandeur than on emotionally engaging the audience. She also suggested the film was somewhat overrated and that its popularity may exceed its actual value.
John Simon (New York Magazine):
• Simon was known for his scathing reviews and was not impressed by The Godfather, dismissing the film as “a glorification of the mafia and a love of violence.” He also criticized the film’s portrayal of Italian-Americans, believing it perpetuated negative stereotypes.

Also, Renata Adler’s review for the New York Times was “quoted” (even though she left the Old Gray Lady in 1969). That’s what programs like ChatGPT do: They tell you what you want to hear.

Others have claimed that the trailer creator made up the quotes himself, which could be true (perhaps they were placeholders that made it through the process). That was the excuse given in 2000 when Sony released a series of trailers quoting someone named David Manning, who always had nice things to say about their movies.

“The production team behind ‘Big Daddy’ has hit the jackpot again!” he said of Rob Schneider’s abomination “The Animal.” And he called Kevin Bacon’s film “Hollow Man,” about the invisible man, “a damn scary ride!” Except David Manning didn’t exist and the studio was forced to refund $5 to anyone who had been duped into seeing those films by misleading advertising.

The truth is, nothing undermines film criticism more than when studio marketing departments shorten and twist our words to make them sound like exaggerations. They’ve been doing this for decades, and any savvy moviegoer knows that the “critics love it” strategy should be taken with a grain of salt.

Personally, I see my role as a film critic a bit like the proverbial Beefeaters of the English court: we taste the dish first to make sure it isn’t poisoned or otherwise spoiled. If it’s edible, we tell you. That’s the consumer guide aspect of our job, although there’s a lot more to it: we also evaluate and analyze a film’s artistic strengths and offer insights into how an imperfect work of art could have been improved.

Admittedly, critics have long turned up their noses at flashy, high-budget productions like Megalopolis. In 1979, Canby’s review of Apocalypse Now complained about “the lack of restraints on the artist” and accused Coppola of risking his own fortune on such a “grandiose scale.” A few years later, critics took cruel pleasure in deriding Michael Cimino for his gigantically overpriced Heaven’s Gate. And the press treated James Cameron’s Titanic as a colossal miscalculation (why would anyone want to see a movie when they already know the ending, the joke went) until it broke box office records and tied Ben-Hur for the most Oscar wins of all time.

But that doesn’t mean that the critics will be wrong in this case. “Megalopolis” Is a mess. Sure, the film is chock full of great ideas that Coppola has been nurturing for a quarter of a century, but the garish execution suggests that the master director has forgotten everything he has learned.

The odd thing about the trailer for Megalopolis is the implication that Lionsgate couldn’t find enough positive reviews to make the film seem better than it is. Studios have been doing this for decades, because potential audiences may be skeptical of quote-whores, but they’re even more suspicious of a film that opens with no recommendations whatsoever.

Over the years, studio marketing departments have found ways to tailor ad copy to their liking without completely inventing it: Why, for example, didn’t they try to persuade serious critics in the early 2000s? Instead, they invited the fanboys – bloggers and online journalists who tend to hype up GI Joe and superhero movies – and let them publish their reviews first, then cherry-picked the most effusive responses for their own ads?

Today, they’re doing this with influencers by foregoing all-media screenings (pre-release screenings routinely offered to press) and instead hosting special promo events where people with TikTok followers are offered free cocktails and encouraged to share their reactions on social media.

This strategy almost always works for newcomers who aren’t used to being courted by studios. The most notorious example I can think of is the time Sony flew Ain’t It Cool News! founder (and self-proclaimed “geek”) Harry Knowles to New York to attend the premiere of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla reboot, in return for which they received enthusiastic support.

But even old hands fall for it, especially the junket press: semi-serious film journalists who have to give their “reactions” after the screenings, which can then appear in film advertisements. Recently, awards consultants have started courting Oscar experts, inviting them early and tailoring the awards campaigns to their reactions. Both are Consideration Agreements with obvious conflicts, since no one wants to be excluded from such access.

A handful of critics view blurbs as positive advertising for themselves and their media. This used to be the case with Shawn Edwards, Peter Travers, and Pete Hammond (back in his Maxim days), all of whom took advantage of the opportunity to be given advance notice and repaid it with wildly inflated praise.

If you’re a self-promoter who wants to be quoted, here’s a quick tip: Put an adverb with “—ly” right before a punchy adjective (e.g., “refreshingly original” or “amazingly derivative”). This construction is like catnip for marketing departments, who love phrases that sound positive (like the word “page-turner”) even when they aren’t.

The trailer for Megalopolis isn’t the first time that movie marketers have tried to turn bad reviews into an advantage. Early in John Waters’ career, the mischievous low-budget director enjoyed scathing reviews, slapping them on posters (“Pink Flamingos” quotes the Detroit Free Press review: “Like a septic tank explosion, it has to be seen to be believed”). Trailers for David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre all used negative reviews to their advantage.

At diversitywe deliberately write in a way that avoids being taken out of context. The copy you see in ads has been personally signed by the critics who wrote them. It is company policy that critics do not express their reactions until the review appears, because experience has shown that these comments can be used against the critic – for example, if a producer gets wind of the critic not liking the film, or if the marketing people use this seemingly spontaneous reaction in the campaign.

Nevertheless, there are many situations in which diversity Reviews are quoted in ads, which makes sense in a way. The journal makes a point of reviewing as many films as possible as soon as they have their world premieres – at film festivals like Sundance, Cannes and Toronto – and we cover dozens of films that most media outlets might not review at all.

To keep my critic friends humble, I have a long-standing tradition of giving them a custom t-shirt the first time one of their reviews appears on a poster or trailer. Each shirt has “QUOTE WHORE” written across the chest and the offending slogan on the back.

There’s nothing wrong with being correctly quoted (though that’s rare, in fact), and I don’t want to discourage new critics from supporting films that deserve it. But I find it a little perverse when a film critic’s name appears on a poster in larger font than that of the filmmaker or stars, and I find it helps to remember that your words can and will be used against you.