We all want Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” to turn out great. This could be the master’s final film, but, more importantly, it’s one he’s been working on for more than 40 years.
Coppola has shown 30 minutes of “Megalopolis” to Spike Lee down in Atlanta. Lee announced the meeting on Instagram. Lee’s reaction: “OMG amazing.” Honestly speaking, Spike’s writing is a tad, um, all over the place — he calls it “Metropolis.”
The movie is looking at a Cannes 2024 premiere next May, and stars Adam Driver, Forrest Whittaker, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishbourne, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Talia Shire, and Dustin Hoffman.
Coppola, a legendary Oscar-winning director is self-funding “Megalopolis,” a passion project more than four decades in the making. He recently sold his lucrative winery to fund the film, which was said to cost around $120 million.
Here’s a new synopsis of the mysterious ”Megalopolis”:
In New York, a woman is divided between loyalties to her father, who has a classical view of society, and her lover, who is more progressive and ready for the future.
Coppola started writing “Megalopolis” in the early ‘80s. The earliest anecdote has Coppola talking about the project during the 1982 shoot of “The Outsiders.” So, this project must have been ruminating in his head right after 1979’s “Apocalypse Now,” maybe even before.
In a May 2007 interview, Coppola even stated that he had to direct “Bram Stoker's Dracula”, “Jack,” and “The Rainmaker” to get out of debt and fund “Megalopolis”. That’s how important this film is to him.
Director Mike Figgis, who shot a behind the scenes doc on the set of “Megalopolis,” gave us additional details as to what to expect when it comes to Coppola’s epic. He described the film as “Julius Caesar meets Blade Runner" and that the runtime would be around 2 hours.
Now the question is whether Spidey can become the first movie to cross $1 billion domestically. With its legs having slowed down, and $63M in receipts still needed, I highly doubt it.