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At first, it appeared to end with a whimper. After decades of talk, Francis Ford Coppola’s forever-gestating dream project Megalopolis debuted in movie theaters in fall 2024, and promptly flopped at the box office, grossing a paltry $14m worldwide against a budget around $120m, much of which was put up by Coppola himself. Not even a series of splashy Imax presentations, including some with a live-actor element, could entice more than a relative handful of curious cinephiles out of the house to witness Coppola realize his ambition of making a movie about a visionary, time-stopping architect (Adam Driver) and the decadent city only he can save with his brilliant blueprints.
Some of the movie nerds showed up to watch Driver speechify, to immerse themselves in digital evocations of a futuristic, Rome-New York City hybrid, and enjoy the eclecticism of a cast that also includes Laurence Fishburne, several members of Coppola’s family, SNL’s Chloe Fineman, a number of semi-canceled actors encouraged to ham with impunity, and Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum. A bunch of the movie’s original viewers had some fun making jokes on social media; a few mounted genuine defenses in the digital pages of Letterboxd and the like. But unsurprisingly, the movie did not figure into year-end awards consideration. After months-to-years of buildup, the movie left theaters within a few weeks, and was available to stream at home a little while later. For most movies, that’s a recipe for disappointed shrugs.
Then something happened. Or rather, one thing didn’t happen: Megalopolis never made it to the kinds of subscription-streaming channels that sometimes leads to a quick rediscovery (or, in some cases, couch-dwelling derision). The movie was briefly available to rent or buy on video on demand, but disappeared from those outlets relatively quickly, and didn’t surface on other common home-video formats in North America. (It was released on physical media in some other countries.)
Instead, Coppola launched a six-city speaking tour over this past summer, screening the movie and engaging in a two-hour lecture about some of its broadest themes (topics on the agenda included “time”, “work”, and “war”). If you missed this, intentionally or otherwise, you might still be able to catch Megalopolis on this coming New Year’s Day, when it will screen again in what Coppola claims to hope will become an annual tradition. He also supposedly plans for a “director’s cut” – sorry, then what was it we watched last fall, exactly? Someone else’s cut – called Megalopolis Unbound: longer, weirder, maybe some dream sequences. (Was the whole movie not his own dream sequence?)
If you can’t wait that long and want some kind of glimpse of the Megalopolis world at home, there’s also a whole separate documentary: Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis, is available to rent after its own festival-and-theatrical run this past fall. It includes scraps of alternate versions of the film from its lengthy development, including a table read with Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman, and a rehearsal with a young Ryan Gosling. There’s also apparently plenty of Plaza staying in character as journalist Wow Platinum. It’s not the full Megalopolis, but it’s more extensive than most DVD special features these days.
Meanwhile, he’s selling those lecture tickets and also some extremely fancy watches; given how much he’s paid for his dream-project movie, it’s no wonder he’d want to get as many releases and cuts as possible out of the experience. He’s also performing a more eccentric version of a practice common to contemporary cinema: branding. Megalopolis does not exactly promise a sequel – it’s more of an all-on-the-floor movie, which is why the idea of a director’s cut feels so loopy despite it running well under 150 minutes – and anyway, that would cost another arm and a leg. But maybe he can force the cult-movie issue by more tightly controlling the movie’s distribution. There is something chic about scarcity in art, after all, and there will always be interest in Coppola as an artist in what is likely the final decade-and-change of his life. For the moment, he seems willing to parlay that interest into making Megalopolis happen.
In some ways, it’s a brave rebuke to the half-ephemeral, half-disposable nature of contemporary film culture. An environment re-oriented toward streaming, influencers and online weirdos can burn people out on buzzy movies before they’re even released with memetic obsessiveness; movies from major film-makers can go straight to Netflix and get shuffled around the tiles until they’re nestled in between glorified Hallmark movies and Dateline-level true-crime docs; where movies can make hundreds of millions in theaters and unceremoniously turn up as one more option on your smart TV three weeks later.
Can Coppola will this into being on his own, insisting that his movie has been misunderstood before others have a chance to reclaim it more organically? It seems unlikely. I had a blast seeing Megalopolis in Imax last fall, but the idea of paying to see Coppola ramble about it and the state of the world only fills me with dread. Even the idea of an extended cut feels a bit like when Zack Snyder tried to gin up interest in two additional versions of his Netflix sci-fi movies Rebel Moon. Choosing the object of a cult is something that, well, actual cult leaders do; movie cults are more endearing because they choose their own targets, rather than being manipulated into joining.
Still, there’s precedent for this kind of ongoing exhibition. Though the New Year’s Day screenings aren’t in Imax, those specialty large-format theaters do sometimes run into dry spells where studios don’t have the latest blockbuster ready for them. (Just last week, some Imax theaters, in between Zootopia and Avatar sequels, were hosting combined revivals of Sinners and One Battle After Another, though both movies are available at home.) Fathom Entertainment and cheap-to-distribute digital prints have brought a rep-house sensibility to some multiplexes. The weekend after Diane Keaton’s death, three of her signature movies were screening at AMCs around the US.
Moreover, the ritualization of Megalopolis would probably be more widely admired if the movie itself had a better reputation. (Recall the similarly intentional scarcity of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, which initially showed in just one theater at a time, and even now remains relatively difficult to find.) Re-releasing the movie on New Year’s Day is appealing because Megalopolis is, in fact, a New Year’s-y movie: shiny, ridiculous and hopeful – and more than a little fake. Movies get unsolicited “45th anniversary” or theme-month revivals all the time now. Who says a museum-quality, agreed-upon classic should be the only cinema allowed to turn itself into a weird little holiday? Coppola would probably prefer to imagine that the ideas of Megalopolis are too nagging, far-reaching, and ambitious for people to let go. But the movie offers little more than vague, sometimes questionable platitudes in reference to how to build a better future as a society. What it has to offer is an experience – a quixotic quest to build a better, or at least weirder, in-person cinema.
