New Francis Ford Coppola movie ‘Megalopolis’ is a mega flop at the box office

When you hear the name Francis Ford Coppola, you immediately think big. Epic movies such as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy have cemented Coppola’s name and his bold, brash cinematic style into the annals of cinematic history.

So, when it comes to a movie that’s supposedly been four decades in the making – a passion project according to the director himself – you think things are going to be as grand as the iconic stuff that came before it. Alas, Coppola’s new film Megalopolis is actually proving to be a mega-flop.

All the expected tropes are there – the mafioso connections, the lavish settings – but the storyline and try-hard pathos are abysmal.

The plot focuses on a Nobel prize-winning architect and scientist, Cesar Catilina, played by a too self-conscious Adam Driver, who gets pissed at social events to escape the torment of his wife’s death in a car accident. From drastic drama to out-there sci-fi, the story then moves into Catilina becoming a superpower of sorts – he’s invented a new building material called Megalon which is tougher than any other of its kind, and the discovery appears to have given him secret powers to control time and space. More fi than sci, then.

I can imagine how the idea of this one came about and stuck around for 40 years: Coppola is lounging in his home theatre, dry martini in hand, and someone has left a copy of Metropolis in the video machine whose sepia-stained contents are flashing across a giant wall. The flickers of celluloid from Fritz Lang’s limited medium (telecine to tape) are more eye-catching than a shoot-out scene from one of Coppola’s own cinematic offerings. “That’s it!”, the director howls, jumping up from his plush seat. “I’ll make my own Metropolis! Only mine will be mega-big!”

The sentiment is a grand one, but the planning and execution are sure to have been overblown. Yet the auteur ego prevails and, 40 years on, Megalopolis is made. Its name was too much of a mouthful to start with. Kids today hardly have the patience to watch a 15-second film trailer on TikTok – let alone want to sit there trying to pronounce a film title from a double-barrelled director, now in his mid-80s. As for the adult demographic who would be more familiar with Coppola’s output and clout, senility and short-term memory loss might make it harder for even them to keep up.

While the aesthetic is rather pleasing to the eye – all art deco everything – the lack of substantial, credible story makes this film more flop than mega. It seems Francis Ford Coppola’s patriarchal assets of empire and legacy are no longer valuable in the new, digital age; the expense of bombast and carbon waste (courtesy of big production) now too intangible to liquidate.

Coppola himself had doubts about the movie, saying he would write it off as a bad debt on his next tax return if the film flopped.

The self-financed $136 million movie earnt just $4 million over its first three days of opening weekend, ranking sixth behind Devara: Part 1, a three-hour Telugu-language action picture.

Antonino Tati