Sony Had to Invent a Fake Movie Critic to Praise Rob Schneider

As you may have heard by now, Lionsgate just yanked the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive epic Megalopolis after it was discovered that the trailer fabricated quotes from film critics. 

Weirdly, the quotes were all negative, and concerned Coppola’s past masterpieces, a sly way of undercutting any current bad reviews for the new $120 million flick. But catty criticisms from well-known critics, about classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, turned out to be totally bogus, seemingly thanks to A.I., which stupidly left every legitimately scathing review of Coppola’s Jack lying on the table. 

While faking bad reviews for a trailer might be wholly unprecedented, this isn’t the first time that a studio has faced scrutiny over false pull quotes. Back in 2000, a critic named Dave Manning, of The Ridgefield Press, was quoted in ads for several new films, all released by Columbia Pictures. These movies included the Rob Schneider vehicle The Animal, the comedy in which Schneider plays a man who is turned into a feral creature by a mad scientist. 

Shockingly, many critics weren’t quick to praise Schenider’s work, which found him both seducing a goat and humping a mailbox. But Manning called The Animal “another winner!” Really? Manning also heaped praise on Kevin Bacon’s unnecessarily pervy Hollow Man and the Chris O’Donnell thriller Vertical Limit. 

Well, it turned out that the critic, who baffling adored the movie starring the “Makin' Copies” guy and a former Survivor castaway, didn’t actually exist. While the outlet was real, the small town Connecticut weekly paper had never even heard of “Dave Manning” when questioned by suspicious reporters from Newsweek in 2001. This was around the same time that Manning praised The Patriot, the gore-soaked story of the founding of America starring a terrible Australian, naturally.

It turned out that Manning was the invention of a Sony employee, who concocted the fake reviewer in an effort to bolster some of the studio’s more turd-like releases, naming his fictional creation after a real-life friend. “It was an incredibly foolish decision, and we’re horrified,” Sony spokesperson Susan Tick stated at the time. Although, come to think of it, we have no way of knowing for sure if “Susan Tick” was real, either! Sounds made up!

Some movie-goers weren’t happy with the news, and filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that they paid good money to see a bunch of crappy movies purely because this Dave Manning guy vouched for them. Sony eventually settled the case for $1.25 million, which sounds like a lot, but it only enabled people to claim “as much as $5 for each ticket purchased.”

Sony also announced that any unclaimed “portions of the settlement” would go to charity. They didn’t say which charity, but we’re guessing “the Human Fund.” 

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