After decades of development, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed film Megalopolis was finally released in cinemas on September 27. It cost the director US$120 million (£91.5 million) and has received overwhelmingly negative reviews, with a global box-office taking of just US$4 million during its opening weekend. This has prompted reports that the film is crumbling, sputtering and a “financial disaster”.
Megalopolis frames the US as the new Roman Empire. On the surface, the film is about what happens when an empire’s decline has reached rock bottom and there is no sense of what comes next – except for a radical, utopian experiment by a young but troubled architect and scientist (Adam Driver), whom the people in power dislike.
But on a deeper level, and for those familiar with Coppola’s 60-year career, the young, troubled visionary played by Driver looks a lot like the director himself, who over the course of his career has had epic battles with the studios and the conglomerates that have controlled cinema since the 1960s.
