Francis Ford Coppola has been trying to make Megalopolis longer than a good portion of us have been alive, this writer included. A project that first began its infancy in 1979, everything and anything has gotten in the way of making it a reality. Eventually, Coppola did what anyone with enough money and prestige could do: to do it himself with his own money, $120 million. He managed to gather an impressive cast consisting of Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire, Dustin Hoffman, and D. B. Sweeney all of whom filmed the project from November 2022 to March 2023.
Megalopolis is set to compete at the Cannes Film Festival this year, but the question of distribution has come up. So far, the film only has distribution deals in France, but there are rumors that some studios are interested in the movie. If it premieres well later this month, all of the heavy hitters will come out, and we should expect a massive bidding one to break out, which may be one of the biggest we have seen in a long time. That might be enough to make people push back against the thing keeping studios from pulling the trigger, which is the demand that the “producers, including Coppola, are seeking half of the movie’s revenues.” When you’re someone like Coppola, you get to make demands like that, and there are even reports that he wants a marketing budget north of $100 million.
The first images came out earlier this month, along with a clip that Coppola shared directly with his YouTube channel, which didn’t tell us much about the film. However, he released a teaser trailer today that shows a ton of footage and gives people some hints about the film itself. The Cannes Film Festival premiere for this film will take place on Friday, so reactions to the film should start dropping once the film ends. The film still doesn’t have a distribution deal outside of France, so the responses to the movie at Cannes will be pivotal to this film gaining any distribution. A lot is riding on this screening.
