Posted in: Movies, News | Tagged: francis ford coppola, Megalopolis

First Look Clip At Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis

Director Francis Ford Coppola has shared a first-look clip at Megalopolis before its Cannes Film Festival premiere on May 17th.

Francis Ford Coppola has been trying to make Megalopolis longer than a good portion of us have been alive, this writer included. A project that first began its infancy in 1979, everything and anything has gotten in the way of making it a reality. Eventually, Coppola did what anyone with enough money and prestige could do: to do it himself with his own money, $120 million. He managed to gather an impressive cast consisting of Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire, Dustin Hoffman, and D. B. Sweeney all of whom filmed the project from November 2022 to March 2023.

Megalopolis is set to compete at the Cannes Film Festival this year, but the question of distribution has come up. So far, the film only has distribution deals in France, but there are rumors that some studios are interested in the movie. If it premieres well later this month, all of the heavy hitters will come out, and we should expect a massive bidding one to break out, which may be one of the biggest we have seen in a long time. That might be enough to make people push back against the thing keeping studios from pulling the trigger, which is the demand that the "producers, including Coppola, are seeking half of the movie's revenues." When you're someone like Coppola, you get to make demands like that, and there are even reports that he wants a marketing budget north of $100 million.

The first images have been released, and now Coppola has released the film's first clip to his personal YouTube channel as well. It doesn't tell us much about the movie or what to expect, but teases rarely do. Cannes premieres for films with massive directors and massively impressive casts usually feel like a formality or an early victory lap. The Cannes premiere on May 17th of Megalopolis could be the thing that makes or breaks this film in terms of distribution of any kind. Who will roll the dice on this film if it doesn't do well? We'll have to see.

Here is an appreciation of MEGALOPOLIS from 'known source' critic Scott Foundas: "A man balances precariously on a ledge high above a once-grand city in the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, and the movie that follows is – at least in part – about an entire civilization teetering on a similarly precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn. The man is called Caesar (Adam Driver), like the Roman general who gave rise to the Roman Empire, Cesar the labor leader who organized California's farm workers in the 1960s, and a few other notably great men of history. But he is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it. And, after decades of planning, MEGALOPOLIS the movie is the powerful elixir he has produced: a sweeping, big-canvas movie of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its maker's 84 years of age. Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie – no, the experience (complete with in-theater "live cinema") – that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his APOCALYPSE NOW, MEGALOPOLIS isn't a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where APOCALYPSE left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, MEGALOPOLIS, surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future."

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