The bad news for Francis Ford Coppola is that he made Megalopolis at exactly the wrong time. A long, pretentious, semi-coherent arthouse film about progress through architecture, starring Jon Voight’s erection and a man who can stop time for no apparent reason, was probably always going to struggle to make money.
But to make it for over $100m of his own money and release it in 2024, in an age where the bulk of the public have largely given up on visiting the cinema, was disastrous. Its box office gross, in the end, was just $14.4m. For comparison, that puts it roughly in line with the gross of a French language biopic about Charles Aznavour released the same year. But that film cost four times less, didn’t open in any English-speaking countries and wasn’t about the proposed construction of a glowing golden city.
