Francis Ford Coppola says ‘Megalopolis’ Will be Out in “A Few Months”

In the latest episode of The Accutron Show, Francis Ford Coppola confirms that we’ll most likely be seeing “Megalopolis” this year, and, maybe, much sooner than we even realize.

All I can say is I love the actors in it. It’s unusual, and it’s never boring. Other than that, wait and see. It’s only going to be a few months and it’ll be out.

It does sound like Coppola is very close to wrapping post-production work on his epic, which leads me to believe the inevitability of a Cannes Film Festival debut, and an official release to follow soon after.

A Cannes debut is still risky, to put it mildly, because if “Megalopolis” is met with bad reviews on the Croisette then it could put a major damper in Coppola’s search for a distributor. For that reason alone, there is a small, very small, chance that “Megalopolis” gets held for a fall rollout, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

Coppola holds Cannes in the highest esteem and he probably wants “Megalopolis” to be in competition. A few years ago, it was revealed that Coppola gave Cannes an ultimatum for his 2009 film “Tetro”: Competition or you just don’t get to screen the movie. Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux eventually denied Coppola’s wishes and “Tetro” did not go to the festival.

However, the more legendary Cannes story goes that Coppola told the Festival, in 1979, that he wouldn’t send “Apocalypse Now” unless it was in competition. They accepted his proposition, despite the film having not completed post-production work at the time of the lineup announcement.

“Megalopolis” 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 sold his lucrative winery to fund the film, which was said to cost around $120 million. Here’s the synopsis:

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 “Apocalypse Now,” maybe even before.