Lessons in promotional prompts.
Megalopolis (2024)
The marketing for Francis Ford Coppola‘s film Megalopolis (2024) features negative quotes from critics about Coppola’s earlier films, The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), which now considered classics. The twist: in an AI double-fail, the film’s distributor Lionsgate‘s marketing department asked ChatGPT for review pull quotes – but the responses it provided weren’t retrieved, but generated:
Civil War (2024)
In the marketing for writer-director Alex Garland‘s Civil War (2024), film studio A24 utilised AI-generated images:
Many, such as RestoreMiAmor, were quick (and correct) to criticise the aesthetics – and ethics – of a film studio seemingly resorting to using AI to produce marketing materials:
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor) 
AI-generated marketing for ‘Civil War’ (2024) (critique by RestoreMiAmor)
However, some of the criticism seems to conflate the quality and technology of the images, and how that bodes for the future of art, with criticism that the images are not literally taken from the film, and are therefore confusing or misleading. This is not only an incredibly narrow view of the possibilities of teasing a film, it ignores a whole history of the use of marketing as its own canvas for expanding the world within, and building hype for, a movie. We look at some infamous examples here:
Further Viewing
More on AI in film-making – the scary, and the helpful: