After a long time within the making — involving a number of cycles of shelving and revisiting, a private funding of $120 million, casting scandals, on-set scandals, trailer scandals, and extra — Francis Ford Coppola’s ardour mission, Megalopolis, lastly opened in theaters this previous weekend. Sadly, it’s displaying on the field workplace left a lot to be desired.
Opening to large launch on Friday (September twenty seventh), Megalopolis introduced in solely $4 million over its first weekend, seemingly sealing its destiny as a field workplace flop within the face of Coppola’s gamble that self-funding the movie can be value it to not need to cope with studio oversight. As sondramedia’s Liz Shannon Miller wrote in her evaluation, the movie is turning into “the world’s most costly cautionary story in relation to spending $120 million of 1’s personal cash so that you simply don’t need to hearken to studio notes.”
Coppola first conceived the idea for Megalopolis within the Eighties, hoping to interlope Roman historical past and trendy America for a narrative about humanity, society, and energy. Within the years since, the movie has gone out and in of manufacturing limbo, however finally got here into fruition over the previous few years, with a forged consisting of Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, and extra.
However regardless of Coppola’s sweeping imaginative and prescient, Megalopolis’ constructive attributes really feel, as Miller mentioned in her evaluation, “overshadowed by the movie’s worst decisions,” which embody casting “individuals who had been canceled” — just like the disgraced Shia LaBeouf — for the sheer sake of not showing like a “woke Hollywood manufacturing.”
Moreover, there have been controversies concerning Coppola’s allegedly inappropriate and unprofessional habits in the direction of extras on set, and a weird blunder during which the movie’s trailer used faux quotes, leading to it being pulled by the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate (who issued an apology for “screwing up”).
On high of all of that, audiences appear to only not just like the movie very a lot, with it solely receiving a D+ ranking by way of CinemaScore.
For extra, revisit sondramedia’s interview with Megalopolis’ star, Adam Driver, discussing the movie’s manufacturing course of, Coppola’s imaginative and prescient, and extra.
