While a recent opinion piece by Sam Wasson in the Times suggests Coppola has already begun imagining another film he’d like to make, this one being a musical, the truth is the filmmaker is 85 years old. And he spent 40 years thinking about Megalopolis before he finally made it. There remains a decent chance that Megalopolis will be his final film. He certainly tackled the movie with the verve and ambition of an artist who was out to make a grand, and potentially lasting, statement about the meaning of creation and existence.
Admittedly, Coppola and Lionsgate got some fairly awful publicity last month after the studio ran a trailer with AI-generated quotes from deceased critics supposedly maligning the director’s most popular works, including The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. Those quotes were fake and revealed a startling lack of due diligence or competency somewhere in the marketing department. But as embarrassing (and thin-skinned) as that miscue was, it’s not hard to imagine that Coppola is a filmmaker who’s felt like the knives have been out for him from nearly the beginning. Ever since he won his first Oscar for co-writing Patton at age 30, and his first Best Picture award for directing The Godfather while only 32, his popularity was quickly matched by the anticipatory schadenfreude eager to see his growing hubris stumble and fall.
Apocalypse Now was mockingly called “Coppola’s Folly” in the press, with many eager to see the movie he spent two years making in the jungle blow up in a puff of smoke ahead of its Cannes premiere in 1979. Instead it won the Palme d’Or. Not even 15 years later, Coppola “slumming” in something as lurid and threadbare as “another” Dracula movie produced a similarly gleeful strain of negativity in the press ahead of release. That film also turned out to be much more surrealist and strange than was typical for a Hollywood horror, and some cynics japed it would be Coppola’s “Bonfires of the Vampires.” (This was in reference to the then recent and spectacular failure of Brian De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities adaptation.)
Both of those movies of course proved to be box office hits and are considered classics today, with Apocalypse Now furthermore being generally recognized as one of the greatest films ever made. Yet here we are, after decades of gossiping, with the red meat finally on tap in 2024. The latest (and final?) Coppola epic is a financial quagmire and a critical failure. One need not turn to AI to generate the negative pull-quotes from this thing—personally I found Megalopolis to be an unfinished, if periodically fascinating, mess. It’s a failure of reach exceeding grasp.
Yet that is just one opinion, formed by engaging with a refreshingly original piece of art. And the thing about Megalopolis is that Coppola didn’t make it to turn a profit in September 2024. He made it as a grand statement on art, and perhaps life, in modern America. And by virtue of being a closing statement from one of the great authors in his medium, Megalopolis will always have value to be watched, discussed, debated… and maybe eventually reappraised.
It’s not even the first time the filmmaker ran into a public failure. Forty-two years ago, Coppola released the almost painfully well-titled One from the Heart. The film was intended to be the first in a new wave of American cinema produced by Coppola’s American Zoetrope, a production company that the filmmaker had at last turned into a bonafide studio. In theory, it would have been an independent distributor who could compete with the traditional Hollywood majors, but this one would let filmmakers create anything they want with minimal interference.
