Flops and Follies: The Joker, J.Lo, Costner, Coppola, and the Year in Unchecked Ambition

Now that we’re in the thick of the prestige movie season—festival favorites and indie darlings causing traffic jams at one-screen art houses in cities across the country—it might seem that 2024 was a resounding success for film. But, of course, not all was well this year. Particularly for a few admirably audacious efforts, from quite famous filmmakers, that resoundingly flopped.

Back in May, many of us who work in the orbit of movies boarded airplanes bound for the South of France, where a glut of exciting new films awaited us in Cannes. There were bound to be discoveries, bold new announcements of an ascendant class of global auteurs. Some international stalwarts were returning as well, as happens every year at Cannes. But in 2024, two elder American titans were also set to unveil their latest opuses, more of a rarity at the festival. Anticipation for those was perhaps highest of all.

On one side of the ticket was Francis Ford Coppola, debuting the long-gestating sci-fi, civic drama Megalopolis, his first film in 13 years—and certainly his biggest, most expensive effort since 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The most pertinent part of the Megalopolis story—before any of us had seen it, anyway—was also its most inspiring: Coppola financed the film himself, selling off various wine-industry assets to finally realize a dream he’s closely held for over 40 years. On Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast, I optimistically predicted a comeback smash: perhaps this crazy, can-do movie from a legend of yesteryear could win best picture.

Only slightly less enthusiastically, Cannes-goers looked forward to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, the first installment in a planned four-film series that Costner partially funded himself. (That word, “series,” would eventually come to haunt the movie.) If everything worked out as planned, these films would comprise a high-gloss Western epic of the likes unseen since Costner’s Dances With Wolves stormed both the box office and the Oscars in 1990. Costner’s directorial fortunes were far dicier following that watershed success, but he’s recently rebounded on television. Maybe this year was the time for Costner to reassert himself as a movie-star auteur, capable of an old-fashioned American sweep in a way few others even attempt these days.

Expectations were high on the Croisette, a swaggering American chauvinism cutting a path through all the usual Euro swishing. Here was a beachhead for a resurgence of Hollywood mastery, financed by the masters themselves. The successes of Megalopolis and Horizon would teach an important lesson to the intransigent, IP-mad studios: audiences are hungry for new things, even from old hands. It is high time for the ushering in of a third Golden Age, one that has nothing to do with superheroes and all to do with passionate, singular vision. A new day was about to dawn, in France of all places.

But then, well, we saw the movies. Megalopolis was praised by a handful of critics, but largely went over like a lead balloon, cringed at in screenings, laughed at or grumbled over at beachside parties. It was more flail than wild swing, and it seemed near impossible that a major studio would buy the film and distribute it in the manner Coppola had once hoped for—perhaps even expected. Horizon suffered a similar fate, received at Cannes as an erratic and ungainly slog that played more like an overlong TV pilot than an actual movie. But Costner’s film at least already had distribution from Warner Bros. and was set to be released in only a few months. Perhaps the masses would offer robust rebuttal to the snooty naysayers at Cannes.

Those audiences didn’t materialize in June, when Chapter 1 came out. It performed so poorly that Warner Bros. pulled the already filmed Chapter 2 (which had a limp and perfunctory premiere at Venice later in the summer) from its release schedule. Megalopolis was eventually picked up, at minimal cost, by Lionsgate, which released the film in late September. It was a catastrophe, earning paltry sums and scoring an abysmal D+ CinemaScore from audiences. And so the great dream of Cannes was terribly dashed. A populist uprising was staged and then brutally not so much rebuffed as ignored.

My fear is that the great, cynical eye of Hollywood will gaze upon these messes and decide that there is indeed no room for, no interest in the untested ambitions of projects like Megalopolis and Horizon. It will see these self-financed boondoggles as proof that corporate money is generally pointed in the right direction: toward the trustworthy sequels and brand extensions that make up most studio output, with the occasional interruption of an Oppenheimer. Hollywood rarely learns the right things from its successes, and almost always takes away the wrong lessons from its failures.

Though, I suppose in the case of these two movies, Hollywood may view its hands as clean. Coppola and Costner were rogue agents. Though the deep pockets of Apple and Netflix have been opened to Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and other A-list directors in recent years, Coppola and Costner eschewed that path, perhaps knowing that their intended projects would not square on algorithmic, predictive balance sheets housed somewhere in the computer servers ominously thrumming atop barges off the coast of California. And so they sought to prove a point; to go another, rarer route. And they failed.

I’m sorry they did. While I’m no fan of either film, we have reached the point in the movie industry’s tailspin when I earnestly wish for every theatrically released movie to succeed. But perhaps especially the ones that dare to attempt a shake-up, a cracking open that might reveal the possibility lying just beyond the thick membrane of risk aversion that has descended over Hollywood in the last 16 years.

I suppose I must then also mourn the failure of Joker: Folie à Deux, a loathsome sequel that nonetheless tried to disrupt (in the good, non–Silicon Valley way) the lazy patterns of fan service. The backstage narrative of Folie à Deux is an exciting one: director Todd Phillips leveraged the success of the first Joker and exploited the transition period between studio management to essentially run his own, very expensive show, unbothered by notes and other corporate intrusions that might have compromised his vision. That vision ultimately proved a bad one—and maybe accidentally made the case for at least some outside input—but at least it got across the finish line. Its disastrous performance (in box office and audience polling) is a shame, if only because it will likely tighten the purse strings and purview of the big studios yet again.

The idea that the industry might comprehend these failures without taking drastic action to prevent any further incidents of unchecked creativity may be as witlessly utopian as anything in Megalopolis. But that is my fervent, likely doomed, hope anyway: that Megalopolis and Horizon don’t discourage other filmmakers from trying to skirt the system, that Folie à Deux does not further entrench the practice of rigorous and bowdlerizing audience testing.

There’s little room for optimism on the maximalist front. One of the major box office successes of the year was Deadpool & Wolverine, a ruthlessly cynical entwining of franchises that struck a pose of transgression, strenuously insisting to viewers that it was going to upset the very suits who had carefully engineered the movie into being. In actuality it is a slavish paean to tightly orchestrated synergy and branding, a “how do you do, fellow kids” of a movie that sadly seems to have tricked a lot of people. At least Folie à Deux, for its myriad faults, alienated everyone, from lowly customer to CEO.

We will instead have to retreat, yet again, to the dim hope that flickers on the edges of the industry. Look to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a towering American epic that was made for around $10 million and produced outside the US. It was the smash of the fall-festival season and seems bound for Oscar—if not financial—glory. You could make the argument that movies like this only further exonerate the American studio system from even participating in prestige filmmaking; why bother, when the stuff will get made elsewhere anyway? But perhaps that is where we, the audiences, could continue the quiet insurgency that has made some headway with scattered indie successes over the past few years. Like Longlegs, like Civil War. If a movie like The Brutalist, which was picked up by junior studio A24, finds traction, succeeds where Megalopolis failed—reflecting a troubled but potential-laden nation and world back at us—maybe that does inch another auteur somewhere, in any stage of career trajectory, toward their own next great statement.

At the very least, I pray to the entertainment gods that they not let another one of 2024’s glaring, self-funded vanity projects be the last. Though Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, about her pre-Ben Affleck-divorce romantic tribulations, was a helter-skelter flop, wouldn’t we all love to see another diva of stage and screen attempt the same? Just as I would happily anticipate a dozen more Megalopolises or Horizons. They may not all be good, but at least they’d be something other than the usual meal.