Photo: Lionsgate
In Francis Ford Coppola’s allegorical, phantasmagorical fever dream passion-project Megalopolis, Adam Driver portrays a visionary civic planner who can stop time with his mind and builds towering, surreally fluid cityscapes with the help of a mysterious substance called Megalon. Over the weekend, Ford’s self-financed $136 million drama crumbled under the weight of its negative buzz, earning a paltry $4 million over its opening three days of release in 2,000 North American theaters.
To put that box-office return in perspective, Megalopolis ranked sixth behind Devara: Part 1, a three-hour Telugu-language action epic playing on about half as many screens. Moreover, such an underperformance fell wildly short of pre-release “tracking” estimates which had Ford’s two-hour and 18-minute ensemble opus — its cast includes Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza — earning between $7 million and $10 million. Or, to put it another way, Megalopolis would have to continue selling tickets at the same rate for another 24 weeks, with no drop off, to break even (not including its prints and advertising spend: another $30 million to $50 million).
Reputationally and financially, Megalopolis’ 85-year-old writer-director-producer (and not the film’s distributor Lionsgate) has the most to lose. The maverick American auteur behind Apocalypse Now and the Godfather trilogy began conjuring the movie’s script back in the early ‘80s and borrowed $200 million against his Napa Valley winery business to personally bankroll Megalopolis’ nine-figure budget when studio backers deemed the project too risky. Its production designer, visual effects supervisor and supervising art director (in addition to the whole rank and file VFX team) quit during filming due to what has been characterized as an epic case of “creative differences” with Coppola. More damaging, background actresses came forward to accuse the octogenarian of repeated, attempted non-consensual on-set kissing during the filming of a bacchanalian disco scene “to get them in the mood” (Coppola has strenuously denied the allegations). And a disastrous buyers screening for 300 industry machers at Los Angeles’ Universal City Walk IMAX in March left distributors pessimistic about Megalopolis’ commercial prospects.
According to Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, however, focusing solely on Megalopolis’ miniscule ticket sales and D+ CinemaScore may be missing the point. “That the movie even exists in theaters this weekend is kind of a miracle,” Dergarabedian says. “I think a bold, swing-for-the-fences movie release should be celebrated.”
To be sure, these are dark days for Academy Award-winning screen legends’ long-percolating passion projects. In June, writer-director-star Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, the first installment of a western series he began developing in 1988 and plowed $38 million of his own money into, flopped hard. And that compelled its distributor Warner Bros. to delay a theatrical roll out for Horizon: Chapter 2, which had been planned for release two months later (the sequel is still scheduled to be released at an “unspecified date” this year). “Some passion projects do work,” Dergarabedian says. “The films of Tarantino: all of them are passion projects, in a sense. But if you can’t get audiences to feel passionate about going to see the movie, that’s not a recipe for success.”
In post-pandemic, post-strike Hollywood, “Don’t bring me your passion project,” a producer behind a string of blockbusters tells me. “When I hear ‘passion project,’ I’m thinking, No fucking way. Nobody wants it. It’s just gonna be some weird vanity thing that makes 25 cents [in] theatrical [release]. And I’m not doing the heavy lift.”
Lionsgate, for its part, did not finance or pay for any of Megalopolis’ marketing. (In August, the Santa Monica-based studio did take responsibility for creating a trailer for the film full of fake quotes from real critics.) Under terms of a deal it struck in June, after the film premiered to a seven-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, Lionsgate will earn a distribution fee while Coppola will maintain ownership of Megalopolis under his American Zoetrope production banner. “Francis Ford Coppola is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers and a cherished member of our creative family,” Lionsgate’s motion picture group chairman Adam Fogelson said in a statement. “We are proud to partner with him in giving Megalopolis the wide theatrical release it deserves. Like all true art, it will be viewed and judged by movie audiences over time.”
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published before Megalopolis’s megaflopolis, Coppola discussed a contingency plan for a “very useful” tax write-down if the movie flopped. “I’m very old so it all goes into an estate plan,” the director said.
