After many years 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 challenge, Megalopolis, lastly opened in theaters this previous weekend. Sadly, it’s displaying on the field workplace left a lot to be desired.
Opening to broad 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 could be value it to not must take care of studio oversight. As myallmovies’s Liz Shannon Miller wrote in her evaluate, the movie is turning into “the world’s most costly cautionary story with regards to spending $120 million of 1’s personal cash so that you simply don’t must take heed 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 in the end got here into fruition over the previous few years, with a solid 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 stated in her evaluate, “overshadowed by the movie’s worst selections,” which embrace 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 relating to Coppola’s allegedly inappropriate and unprofessional habits in direction of extras on set, and a weird blunder through which the movie’s trailer used pretend quotes, leading to it being pulled by the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate (who issued an apology for “screwing up”).
On prime of all of that, audiences appear to simply not just like the movie very a lot, with it solely receiving a D+ score through CinemaScore.
For extra, revisit myallmovies’s interview with Megalopolis’ star, Adam Driver, discussing the movie’s manufacturing course of, Coppola’s imaginative and prescient, and extra.
