Francis Ford Coppola Shares ‘Megalopolis’ Title Image — to Premiere at Cannes?

Francis Ford Coppola has decided to share, via his Instagram, the title image for his upcoming “Megalopolis.” Let’s hope a trailer is coming soon.

A little birdie told me yesterday that the film has been accepted for Cannes. Is this image drop a coincidence or is Coppola just in celebratory mode? I just have this one source telling me this, but it’s a good one — they have been very reliable in the past.

I also have no idea if it’ll be in or out of competition. 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.

A Cannes debut is still very 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.

The film stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Chloe Fineman, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jason Schwartzman and Jon Voight.

Here’s what I wrote about the film on 01.05.24 —

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.