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Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis movie isn't just bad, it's so bad it might undo a life's work for the legendary filmmaker

Will the man who made Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, and Bram Stoker's Dracula be forever doomed to be remembered by his latest movie?

Features by Graeme McMillan, Editor

Published on Wed Oct 02 2024

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The more that I think about Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis — the beautiful cinematic folly that he famously spent $120 million of his own money to make (funded, in part, by selling part of his winery empire, just as most people would do) — the more I suspect that it’s a movie that will, ultimately, act as a strong argument in favor of everything that’s the very opposite of everything the filmmaker has stood for his entire career.

After all, ahead of its premiere, Megalopolis had accumulated quite the mythology surrounding itself; a movie that Coppola — a filmmaker who has repeatedly demonstrated a single-minded focus that raged against the traditional perceived wisdom of the industry, only to ultimately triumph with movies such as Apocalypse Now, One From The Heart, or even his much-maligned (at the time) Bram Stoker’s Dracula — had been working on for decades, that had repeatedly been turned down by studios and executives who didn’t understand his artistic vision or scope. A movie that Coppola self-financed and made unrestricted by anyone or anything, finally living up to his artistic vision despite the many obstacles that the movie industry had laid at his feet. This was, for better or worse, uncut Coppola: pure cinema, from one of its undisputed masters of the past half century, standing as a rebuttal for the studio system. Who could resist?

As it turns out, the answer seemed to be 'a lot of people.' The movie dramatically flopped at the box office in its opening weekend, making just $4 million despite playing in almost 1,500 theaters across North America. For some context, that was below the already rock-bottom estimates from industry experts for the weekend (which suggested somewhere between $5 million and $7 million), and just over a third of the take of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga Part One, which was considered a massive bomb upon taking $11 million in its opening weekend, despite have a budget $20 million lower than Megalopolis.

It’s easy to see why audiences chose to stay away. To say that reviews for the movie were negative is being polite; one memorable review from SFGate was headlined “Megalopolis is a piece of s—t,” and started, “This is not a review. This is a warning.” (The piece, by Drew Magary, is savage; at one point, it reads, “I took a bullet watching Megalopolis for you. An actual bullet would have been kinder.”)

Whereas Costner’s earlier Horizon was self-indulgent and ultimately boring to those not already onboard with Costner’s own fascinations, Megalopolis proved to be so indulgent and self-obsessed that it didn’t just feel like an example of ego unchecked, but also accidental evidence that all those who stood in Coppola’s way to making the movie in the first place might have been right. I’ve seen more than one review of the movie that offered a variation of the idea, “sometimes, the money men know what they’re doing,” which feels almost religiously wrong, given Coppola’s career to this point.

Megalopolis is a not good movie, and it might be the final movie Coppola ever makes; the director is 85 years old, after all. Just because it’s his last movie doesn’t mean that it’s his ultimate movie, however. It would be a tragedy if his legacy is undone because of this admittedly expensive, significant misstep. After all, who knows? Maybe 30 years from now, the film will be seen as worryingly ahead of its time.

Let's just... not get too worried about what would have to happen to culture in that intervening period for that to be true.

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.