Megalopolis is showing people what kind of dystopian conflicts may arise. Coppola thinks studios may find themselves in their own bleak future.
The time has come for audiences to finally get a look at Francis Ford Coppola’s new passion project, Megalopolis. The buzz has always given the impression that it would be an incredibly divisive movie and from the sounds of the first reactions coming out of Cannes from its premiere, it has been. Critics have been throwing around terms like “mess,” “bloated” and “boring.” However, they also throw around words like “stunning” and “engaged.” This sounds like the kind of madness that the filmmaker aimed to bring to unsuspecting audiences, and as Coppola self-funded this film, he had no suits looking over his shoulder in the making of it.
Coppola experienced the kind of freedom his friend Martin Scorsese had gotten when working with Netflix and Apple. When asked about his thoughts on streaming services, Coppola foresees a future where movie studios face their own “Megalopolis.” According to Deadline, the Godfather director spoke at Cannes and said, “Streaming is what we use to call home video.” He also hopes that his film can find a home in a “large theater with 600 to 700 people.” He continues, “I feel the film industry is about people getting hired to meet debt obligations — their job isn’t to make good movies, but to pay their debt. These new companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — they have plenty of money. But the studios that we know for so long, may not be here in the future.”
When asked about the kind of risk he took in making Megalopolis, which had been kicking in his mind for 40 years and cost $120 million to make (plus asking for distributors to invest $100 million in marketing), Coppola owed it to the wineries that he had opened in Napa and Sonoma. In the 80s, he took out a loan of $20 million and “built a winery like Tivoli Gardens with swimming pools, a place where the kids would go, then grandparents. .. I created a place that now every winery tries to duplicate. I took the money from that, and I put the risk from that [into Megalopolis].”
The risk seems to be pretty non-existent for Coppola as he stated that Megalopolis will leave him with “no problems” financially and that his family, which includes his children Sophia and Roman and their children, “have wonderful careers without a fortune.”
