Megalopolis (Movie)

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    Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” Is a Different Kind of Flop

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    Plenty of movies bomb, but Francis Ford Coppola’s latest is part of a different class of box office failures.Just before previews began at a Lower Manhattan theater on a recent Saturday night, Tazer Army reflected on the Francis Ford Coppola movie “Megalopolis” before even seeing it.“There’s just so much lore,” Army said.She wasn’t wrong. The lore dates back more than 40 years, to when Coppola, the director of the “Godfather” films and “Apocalypse Now,” conceived the project. Now 85, he finally made this long-gestating project a reality by selling part of his wine business to finance the film, which cost roughly $140 million to make and market. There were allegations of on-set misconduct, and a suit by Coppola over the accusations. There was even a trailer with made-up quotations from famous movie critics. And the biggest piece of lore: the fact that “Megalopolis,” as its title does not bother to deny, is a grandiosely personal vision that seemed fated to lose a lot of money at the box office — something its dismal opening weekend haul of $4 million confirmed.The upshot is that “Megalopolis” is a film both about a tortured-genius artist (the architect Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver) overcoming obstacles to realize his solitary vision and the product of one. It appears destined to be remembered as the latest instance of a Hollywood archetype that is every bit as key to the industry’s mythology as its biggest hits: the auteurist flop.“It seems you either have the epic, beautiful win of a film that is beloved, or the one that is wrapped up in ego and is scandalous,” said Maya Montañez Smukler, the head of U.C.L.A.’s Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center. “It’s the perverse pleasure in seeing somebody fail on such an enormous magnitude.”Even at the peak of Hollywood’s studio era, there were flops — ambitious, big-budget spectacles that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, brought 20th Century Fox near bankruptcy and failed to recoup its $44 million budget, then a record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Different Kind of Flop

      by

      Plenty of movies bomb, but Francis Ford Coppola’s latest is part of a different class of box office failures.Just before previews began at a Lower Manhattan theater on a recent Saturday night, Tazer Army reflected on the Francis Ford Coppola movie “Megalopolis” before even seeing it.“There’s just so much lore,” Army said.She wasn’t wrong. The lore dates back more than 40 years, to when Coppola, the director of the “Godfather” films and “Apocalypse Now,” conceived the project. Now 85, he finally made this long-gestating project a reality by selling part of his wine business to finance the film, which cost roughly $140 million to make and market. There were allegations of on-set misconduct, and a suit by Coppola over the accusations. There was even a trailer with made-up quotations from famous movie critics. And the biggest piece of lore: the fact that “Megalopolis,” as its title does not bother to deny, is a grandiosely personal vision that seemed fated to lose a lot of money at the box office — something its dismal opening weekend haul of $4 million confirmed.The upshot is that “Megalopolis” is a film both about a tortured-genius artist (the architect Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver) overcoming obstacles to realize his solitary vision and the product of one. It appears destined to be remembered as the latest instance of a Hollywood archetype that is every bit as key to the industry’s mythology as its biggest hits: the auteurist flop.“It seems you either have the epic, beautiful win of a film that is beloved, or the one that is wrapped up in ego and is scandalous,” said Maya Montañez Smukler, the head of U.C.L.A.’s Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center. “It’s the perverse pleasure in seeing somebody fail on such an enormous magnitude.”Even at the peak of Hollywood’s studio era, there were flops — ambitious, big-budget spectacles that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, brought 20th Century Fox near bankruptcy and failed to recoup its $44 million budget, then a record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Aubrey Plaza Goes for Broke in ‘Megalopolis’ and ‘Agatha All Along’

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      “I bleed for movies,” Aubrey Plaza told me on an August morning, just seconds before the ground began to tremble.We had met for brunch at Little Dom’s, a hip Italian restaurant in Los Angeles that was unusually quiet until that low rumble began. Frozen, we stared at each other as the windows rattled — bum-bum-BAM — and then quieted. It was quick and violent, as though someone had seized the place and given it a brisk, get-yourself-together shake.Plaza’s eyes, already open and avid, got even wider. “I think that was an earthquake,” she said. A Google search revealed it to have been a 4.7 temblor out of nearby Pasadena, which prompted us to wonder: If something more severe were to occur, would we know what to do instead of just sitting there blankly?“What if it’s the small one before the big one?” she asked.These days, only a natural disaster could force Plaza to pause. She has spent the last decade working at a nearly nonstop pace, determined to show there’s more to her than April Ludgate, the disaffected intern she played on six seasons of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” Though Plaza’s point has by now been proved — in particular, the 2022 double-header of “The White Lotus” and “Emily the Criminal” amply demonstrated her range — that drive has not yet abated.In fact, Plaza has stayed so prolific that her three newest projects have all come out within days of each other. The first was the charming time-travel comedy “My Old Ass” on Sept. 13, followed by the Marvel series “Agatha All Along,” in which she plays the romantic antagonist to Kathryn Hahn’s “WandaVision” witch. Friday saw the long-awaited release of “Megalopolis,” from the 85-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”), which features Plaza in a grabby role unlike anything she’s played before.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francis Ford Coppola and ‘Megalopolis’: What to Know

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      The controversies surrounding the new epic include accusations of on-set problems, a pulled trailer and more.Francis Ford Coppola waged war with studio heads throughout the making of “The Godfather.” Production on his 1979 Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now,” was so troubled — there was a typhoon and a near-fatal heart attack — that it was chronicled in a documentary.So it’s not exactly a surprise that his latest movie, “Megalopolis,” a nearly two-and-a-half-hour futuristic fable about the battle between art and greed that stars Adam Driver, arrives in theaters Friday mired in controversy.The 85-year-old filmmaker’s self-financed passion project, which he conceived all the way back in the 1970s, has earned headlines about a reportedly chaotic shoot, allegations of misconduct and questions about the film’s commercial prospects. While we wait to see whether it will find a place in the canon of Coppola masterpieces or go down as a $120 million mistake, here is a guide to the movie’s complicated history.When did this all start?More than four decades ago. Yes, you read that right — Coppola first had the idea toward the end of filming “Apocalypse Now” in the late 1970s. The new project, he told Film Comment in 1983, would confront big questions — the why and what of existence. It simmered on the back burner for years — Coppola scrapped and re-envisioned the script in each subsequent decade — until he finally began shooting it in 2022.Why did it take so long to make?Coppola followed up “Apocalypse Now” with “One From the Heart,” a 1982 musical romance that bombed at the box office, grossing a mere $636,796 against a $26 million budget. That meant he was stuck making studio-friendly films for a decade so he could pay off his debts. (A film called “Megalopolis,” after all, hardly portends a small budget.)But even after “The Godfather Part III” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” put him back on track, studios remained cautious about signing on, fearing a repeat of the infamously chaotic production of “Apocalypse Now.” Also, after Sept. 11, the idea of a film about New York City being rebuilt after being nearly destroyed hit a little too, well, close to home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Megalopolis’ Review: The Fever Dreams of Francis Ford Coppola

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      The director’s latest is a great-man story about an architect, played by Adam Driver, driven by ideals and big plans. It’s a personal statement on an epic scale.Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is a bursting-at-the-seams hallucination of a movie — it’s wonderfully out-there. At once a melancholic lament and futuristic fantasy, it invokes different epochs and overflows with entrancing, at times confounding images and ideas that have been playing in my head since I first saw the movie in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, it was both warmly received and glibly dismissed, a critical divide that’s nothing new for Coppola, a restlessly experimental filmmaker with a long habit of going off-Hollywood.Nothing if not au courant, “Megalopolis” is a vision of a moribund civilization, though also a great-man story about an architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who dreams of a better world. An enigmatic genius (he has a Nobel Prize) with an aristocratic mien and a flair for drama, Catilina lives in a city that resembles today’s New York by way of ancient Rome, though it mostly looks like an elaborate soundstage. As familiar as Fifth Avenue and as obscure as the far side of the moon, it is a world that mirrors its real counterpart as a playpen for the wealthy and a prison-house for the destitute. The city haunts Catilina; it also inspires him.What Catilina dreams of is a “perfect school-city,” in which people can achieve their better selves. It’s an exalted aspiration, as seemingly boundless but also as sheltering as the blue sky, and one that invokes a long line of lofty dreamers and master builders. There are predictable obstacles, mostly other people, small-minded types without vision, idealism or maybe just faith. Among these is the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a consummate politician with no patience for fantasies or for Catilina. Their animosity runs through the story, which is narrated by Catilina’s aide, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), dense with incident and populated by an array of noble souls and posturing fools.The fools prove better company in “Megalopolis” than most of the upright types, though with their all-too human comedy they’re not always distinguishable. They begin rushing in after the jolting opener, which finds Catilina dressed in inky black and uncertainly climbing out of a window in the crown of the Chrysler Building. Before long, he is standing with one foot firmly planted and the other shakily raised over the edge. He calls out “time stop” and everything — the clouds above, the cars below — freezes, only to restart at his command. He looks like a colossus, though also brings to mind the early-cinema clown Harold Lloyd hanging over a different abyss in “Safety Last!” (a title that could work for this audacious movie).It’s quite the to-be-or-not introduction. Given that filmmakers are in the business of stopping time, Catilina’s entrance also reads as an auteurist mission statement. So it’s a relief when Catilina gets off that precipice, even if Coppola never really does. The filmmaker has a thing for dreamers and their great, big dreams, and it’s easy to see “Megalopolis” — which he mentioned in interviews as early as 1983 — in autobiographical terms. Like Catilina, Coppola has endured and almost been consumed by catastrophic setbacks (most notably with his founding of a film studio that nearly ruined him), only to rise phoenixlike from the ashes. It’s one reason that “Megalopolis” feels like a personal statement on an epic scale.Giancarlo Esposito plays a consummate politician with no patience for the architect’s fantasies.LionsgateWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      39 Movies to See This Fall: ‘Joker’ Sequel, Bob Dylan Biopic and More

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      From the “Joker” sequel and Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan biopic to a handful of festival darlings, it’s a jam-packed season. Plan accordingly.From an outsize Francis Ford Coppola passion project to a “Joker” follow-up that multiplies the madness by two, the fall movie calendar is going big. Reducing it to a select list of noteworthy titles was a daunting task. Alongside major releases, including sequels to “Gladiator” and “Moana,” we’ve included a large number of films that earned acclaim at this year’s festivals. Many other titles haven’t yet settled on release dates. (All dates and platforms are subject to change.)September‘A DIFFERENT MAN’ Sebastian Stan won best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival for his turn as an actor with a facial disfigurement. As he pines for a new neighbor (Renate Reinsve), a playwright, he undergoes an experimental treatment. Aaron Schimberg directed this offbeat comedy, featuring Adam Pearson as the Stan character’s rival. (Sept. 20; in theaters)‘THE SUBSTANCE’ In what would make an excellent Sept. 20 double feature with “A Different Man,” Demi Moore plays an aging actress reduced to fitness guru-dom who undergoes an experimental treatment of her own. A mysterious injection will divide her into, essentially, two people. Margaret Qualley plays her counterpart. Coralie Fargeat, who wrote and directed, won the screenplay prize at Cannes. (Sept. 20; in theaters)‘WOLFS’ George Clooney and Brad Pitt mastered the art of smooth teamwork over three “Ocean’s” movies, but in this action comedy, their characters — two fixers who wind up on the same job — are initially at loggerheads. Amy Ryan also stars. Jon Watts (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) wrote and directed. (Sept. 20 in theaters, Sept. 27 on Apple TV+)‘LEE’ The celebrated photojournalist Lee Miller got a shoutout in “Civil War” earlier this year. Now she gets a biopic, with Kate Winslet in the role. Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough and Andy Samberg co-star. Ellen Kuras, best known for her work as a cinematographer, directed. (Sept. 27; in theaters)‘MEGALOPOLIS’ Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature since 2011 is a project he’s been talking up for more than 40 years. In an amalgam of contemporary New York and ancient Rome, Adam Driver plays an urban-planning visionary who at various points evokes Robert Moses, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Coppola himself. (Sept. 27; in theaters)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Movies, the Apocalypse Has Already Arrived

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      In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Megalopolis” and more, the sense of an isolated and fearful humanity pervades this season’s films.The apocalypse started earlier this year.Back in March, “Dune: Part Two” picked up the story of Paul Atreides, set 10,000 years after a war with artificial-intelligence beings nearly obliterated humanity. The “Dune” saga suggests history is cyclical, even if the details rearrange themselves. Paul’s world once again teeters on the brink, though the characters don’t know just how close to the edge they are. No matter. The precarity is plenty palpable.Hollywood has sustained a long love affair with tales of apocalypse — look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s obsession with the end of the world. But frequently, the storytelling fits a familiar template. Humanity faces some great threat: aliens, viruses, zombies, meteors, nuclear devices, megalomaniac villains in shadowy lairs. Governments are incapable of dealing with the threat. Only some hero (a retired cop, a retired soldier, a retired superhero) can save the day. He does, and we all cheer.The “Dune” saga feels different, though, and not just because Paul Atreides is not your typical popcorn-movie messiah. This world is darker; the fate of humanity is not guaranteed. The biggest threat to life is not a single clear menace, but a mysterious confluence of factors that nobody, not even the most savvy of characters, quite understands.Here apocalypse moves away from the meaning we usually ascribe to it — mass destruction, curtains on humanity and so on — and toward its older meaning. The English word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokalypsis,” which means revelation. It’s a moment of unveiling, of the hidden things becoming clear. The curtain blows aside briefly and reality becomes lucid. Apocalypse is not always world-historical. Our lives are full of personal apocalypses; our nations experience them repeatedly, often in times of great distress. We learn who we are, what we stand for and what really matters in apocalyptic times. What comes next might be dystopian, or utopian. Most likely, it will be a bit of both.So perhaps it’s unsurprising that cinematic apocalypse, so visible everywhere, has been diversifying. (After all, the movie business is itself fast reaching an apocalyptic moment.) In March, the best picture Oscar went to “Oppenheimer,” a movie about how we arrive at moments of apocalypse. Soon after, “Civil War” — a movie set in a country in the midst of disintegrating — kicked up arguments about its politics. But its real insight was that habitually looking at trauma has changed the characters’ relationship to humanity itself, an apocalyptic realization if there ever was one.“Megalopolis,” with Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel, explores the difference between expedient relationships and those that endure.LionsgateWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Coppola Sues After Report Said He Tried to Kiss ‘Megalopolis’ Extras

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      The director Francis Ford Coppola is seeking at least $15 million in damages from Variety.Francis Ford Coppola, the celebrated director of the “Godfather” movies and “Apocalypse Now,” sued the Hollywood trade magazine Variety and two of its editors for libel this week after it reported that he had behaved unprofessionally on the “Megalopolis” set, including by trying to kiss extras.Coppola, 85, is seeking at least $15 million in damages.The Variety article, which was published in July, said Coppola had pulled women onto his lap and tried to kiss them during the filming of a nightclub sequence. The article included two videos from the set in which the director appears to be trying to hug and kiss extras.The claims echoed those in an article that was published by The Guardian in May. An executive co-producer of the film, which is scheduled to open in theaters this month, told The Guardian that he had heard no complaints of misconduct and that Coppola’s behavior during that sequence was intended to “establish the spirit of the scene.”Libel cases against public figures face a high bar in the United States. People who file such suits must prove not only that a falsehood harmed their reputation, but that the publisher knowingly or recklessly disregarded the truth.“To see our collective efforts tainted by false, reckless and irresponsible reporting is devastating,” Coppola said in a statement on Wednesday, the day his suit was filed in California state court. “No publication, especially a legacy industry outlet, should be enabled to use surreptitious video and unnamed sources in pursuit of their own financial gain.”Coppola sold part of his wine estate to put up $120 million to finance “Megalopolis,” an ambitious and experimental saga about an architect (Adam Driver) who seeks to rebuild a futuristic New York City.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Pulled for Featuring Fake Movie Critic Quotes

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      To promote Francis Ford Coppola’s epic, the spot used supposed lines from The Times, The New Yorker and others to suggest critics were wrong about him.A new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” featuring fake negative quotes from film critics has been pulled by the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate, a spokesman for the company said Wednesday.The trailer, which was posted in the morning, featured quotes from well-known film critics of the past including Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, Vincent Canby of The New York Times and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times panning previous Coppola films like “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”However, as the critic Bilge Ebiri first reported in Vulture, the quotes are not real. The trailer has now been pulled from YouTube, after amassing more than 1.3 million views in the single day it was online.“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a spokesman for the company said in a statement. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”“Megalopolis,” which was self-financed by Coppola and is due in theaters Sept. 27, was initially unable to find a buyer until Lionsgate stepped in. The epic fantasy premiered to a decidedly mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival. On Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at just 53 percent fresh among critics. The trailer seemed to be an effort to show that reviews don’t always get it right when it comes to Coppola’s work.The spot quoted Kael as saying “The Godfather” was “diminished by its artsiness,” when in reality she wrote about it glowingly. While Canby, who served as senior film critic at The New York Times from 1969 to 1993, wasn’t a fan of “Apocalypse Now,” calling it an “intellectual muddle,” he didn’t use the phrase “hollow at the core” as the trailer indicates.The trailer also featured fake quotes from Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and Rex Reed in The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, according to the Vulture report.John Simon of National Review is also included in the spot, and a writer for the magazine posted on X that the staff was checking the archive but believed it to be false.It is unclear how the faked quotes were created. Some on social media, speculating that artificial intelligence tools were used, started feeding prompts to ChatGPT looking for similar results.Lionsgate would not comment on whether ChatGPT or other tools powered by artificial intelligence were used for the trailer.The pulled trailer was not the first controversy surrounding the film. A report in The Guardian in May quoted anonymous sources accusing Coppola of trying to kiss female extras on the set of a nightclub scene. An executive co-producer, Darren Demetre, has said he was unaware of any harassment complaints made during the production, and Coppola later told The Times, “I’m not touchy-feely,” Coppola said. “I’m too shy.” More