There’s so much about Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola’s confounding and objectively terrible passion project that should probably have brought the whole thing screeching to a halt at some point, long before it ever made it to the big screen. Anything from the fact that it was rewritten some 300 times to the bizarre scene where Adam Driver’s character bobs his head back and forth as he saucily intones: “So, go back to the cluuuub.”
It’s a line that’s delivered the way you would if you were 97 years old and trying to talk like the youths. And it, like most of the movie, achieves levels of cringe that will quite literally astound you.
One of the cardinal rules of Hollywood is that a movie’s quality is inversely proportional to how many big-name stars have been jammed into the cast. And in the case of Megalopolis, there are … a lot. In addition to Driver, the cast include also Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, and Laurence Fishburne, to name just a few. As for what it’s about, Lionsgate is advertising this thing with a straight face as a “Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America.”
Esposito plays the greedy, unsympathetic mayor of the city of New Rome, which is basically a stand-in for New York. He clashes with an idealistic architect named Cesar (lol) played by Driver, whose sort of Robert Moses-type character has invented some kind of new building material called Megalon with which he hopes to build his utopian city of the future.
Throughout the movie, you’ve barely had time to process this or that bit of weirdness before Coppola throws more at you. There are random monologues throughout, bizarre character names (like Plaza’s “Wow Platinum”), and a breaking of the fourth wall, for a start. There are times when Driver uses a kind of Foghorn Leghorn accent. Long story short, Megalopolis feels to me like the kind of movie you’d make if you smoked a lot of weed before deciding how to spend your film budget.
Accordingly, this $136 million catastrophe pulled in an embarrassingly minuscule $4 million during its opening weekend — joining epic fails like Argylle and Madame Web for what’s become quite a year for spectacular box office flame-outs.
The internet, no surprise, has thoughts about it all. “laughed a lot at megalopolis, i will grant sometimes intentionally,” one viewer opined on X. “but i have to say that ‘if the baby is a girl we’ll name her Sunny Hope. and if it’s a boy, Francis’ should be up for Howler of the Decade.”
Truth be told, Megalopolis defies rational categorization — and, really, any attempt to normalize it — because the final product is a jumble of sporadic beauty mixed with insanely bad writing and technical choices. “#Megalopolis is a BIG example of an overthought with no direction,” another user said on X. “Ngl there’s some rough stuff: the Shakespearean over the top text, the non stop monologues and the godawful cgi makes it tough, yet there are some truthful beautiful scenes that show what Coppola wants to express.”
According to The Guardian, Coppola at some point during the process shifted to more traditional green screen filming, with the paper quoting a source saying: ‘His dig at us was always, ‘I don’t want to make a Marvel movie,’ but at the end of the day, that’s what he ended up shooting.” Accordingly, the movie currently has a 34% audience score and a 49% critics’ score on the tomato site.
There’s not much else to say except Megalopolis is an objectively bad movie. And it’s too bad the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now didn’t have anyone around to prevent him from turning his final film into such an inchoate mess that’s been playing to near-empty theaters.
