Making some of the best movies of all time doesn’t necessarily mean that selling your latest film will be a walk in the park. Per The Hollywood Reporter, The Godfather trilogy director Francis Ford Coppola is facing an uphill climb with his latest project, Megalopolis, as industry insiders contend that Coppola’s self-funded epic is too “experimental” or simply “not good” enough to justify the $100 million marketing tab Coppola reportedly envisions.
In late March, Coppola’s Megalopolis had its first major screening for Hollywood bigwigs like NBCUniversal chief content officer Donna Langley, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, and Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman, as well as Coppola-adjacent stars like Al Pacino and Nicolas Cage. The reaction was, well, muted, to say the least: One source told The Hollywood Reporter there was “a conspicuous silence at the end” of the film, which runs 2 hours 15 minutes. “Everyone is rooting for Francis and feels nostalgic,” one attendee said. “But then there is the business side of things.” One distributor put it more plainly: “There is just no way to position this movie.”
Coppola’s movie stars Oscar nominee Adam Driver and Emmy nominee Giancarlo Esposito as adversaries attempting to rebuild a city after its destruction. Their dueling visions—Driver plays an idealistic architect, while Esposito is the city’s more pragmatic mayor—come head-to-head in Megalopolis, which is reportedly inspired by ancient Rome. (For instance, both men apparently sport Caesar-like haircuts.) Megalopolis also reportedly features Shia LaBeouf, who was present at the March 28 screening, as well as Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, and Kathryn Hunter.
Coppola began writing Megalopolis almost 40 years ago, in 1983. The 85-year old director took it upon himself to fund the passion project, said to cost $120 million, and reportedly used a significant portion of the profits from the sale of his wine empire to fund it. According to THR, Coppola is interested in an Imax release. Coppola also reportedly believed that he would “make a deal very quickly” with a major studio once the film was finished.
But given what happened at the screening, his intuition may have been off. One screening attendee told THR that Megalopolis felt like “some kind of indie experiment” and suggested that it might find a home on a streaming platform. Not everyone was cold on Coppola, though. “I liked it enormously,” one anonymous specialty-label founder told the outlet. But is he willing to cough up the dough to make sure it gets a wide release? Apparently not. “It takes time to find the right match,” he added.
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