“Zoetrope” is both Coppola’s production company and the title of the filmmaking style it was built around. And both were too early, ambitious, and disorganized to succeed. One From The Heart, the first flagship film of the Zoetrope style, blended classic studio filmmaking with live sound mixing and live editing. It flopped so hard it bankrupted the company. Megalopolis, the second attempt, may just bankrupt Coppola personally. Coppola believes that this new form, using video cameras to shoot and video-enhanced backdrops, could let artists make more bold, independent films than the studio system made possible. When Coppola started developing the concept, Megalopolis was supposed to be the ultimate demonstration of that. 

Coppola began work on Megalopolis in 1982, writing 160 pages of notes over two months and completing its first screenplay in 1984. He intended to shoot the film but by 1989 admitted to biographer Michael Schumacher that the idea may be too “big and complicated” to put on screen. Nonetheless, he persisted, returning to the project in 2001. This time it reached table reads, involving Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Gandolfini, Paul Newman, and Alec Baldwin. Ron Fricke shot 36 hours of second-unit photography of New York City for it, and Coppola hoped to shoot the film on a budget of between $50 million and $70 million. However, after 9/11, the film was shelved again. 

But Coppola kept noodling away. Ryan Gosling was involved at one point. Osvaldo Golijov composed the theme. Whole careers rose and fell, the movie industry completely changed, home video was invented and then replaced by streaming. And Megalopolis was still in chrysalis. And then, in 2019, Coppola sold off a large part of his wine holdings to produce it himself, finally shooting in 2022. 

Nobody can say Coppola’s not persistent. Still, Megalopolis now faces an uphill, or even upcliff, battle for profitability. If it had received rave reviews, then it would be a different story. But it hasn’t. Some critics loved it in a semi-ironic way, saying the film is a “beautiful disaster.” This, though, won’t drive people to cinemas. Others said, worst of all, that it’s dull. To many, it will be best enjoyed as highlight clips on Twitter rather than as a full experience. 

Had it been released as intended in the 1980s, it would have been a guaranteed hit. The combination of out-there story, revolutionary production, and an all-star cast would have made this among the most ambitious films ever made. It would have been a must-see film, the movie of the moment, a picture that consumed every bar, cocktail party, and diner conversation. Films mattered then, and shooting on video cameras, using new techniques for sets, would have been revolutionary. Today though, the all-digital look just looks cheap, and there are no “movies of the moment.” Cinema is a lot less culturally significant, ticket prices are higher than ever, and new releases compete with streaming content, which is functionally free and available instantly from the comfort of your own home. Cinema usually loses.

It’s also just tough material to sell to a crowd. In Coppola’s effort to be “independent” and “revolutionary,” he has produced a profoundly strange film, one that is melodramatic, simplistic, and more head-scratching than thought-provoking. This fable is a futuristic retelling of Roman history but as a commentary on capitalism and climate change and the fate of the world, or something and everything. It’s part Fountainhead, part Kim Stanley Robinson, part Julias Caesar, and altogether quite mental. Characters blend modern speech with archaic phrases, straight Latin, and Shakespearean old English. Some speak in rhyme, others don’t. The main character, Cesar, can pause time. At one point, in the middle of the film, he recites Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. Why? Because why not. There’s also a rogue Russian satellite? And then a cinema staff member chats with a projected Adam Driver. 

None of this is why it’s doomed to flop though. Sure, it could have stood to have an aggressive editor and invested producer to temper Coppola’s worse instincts, and it should really have been made in the ’80s. But as it stands, the film still could have been a hit. Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Top Gun: Maverick aren’t just better than streaming films; they won out and became hits because they fundamentally don’t work on your phone. They needed a crowded theater, and ticket buyers knew. Megalopolis could have been the same, but it needed a distributor as its writer-director-writer-producer. 

Instead, Lionsgate has indicated clearly that it will crash in cinemas, and they will gradually scrape back its costs through video-on-demand sales and streaming deals. This is what happened with Furiosa earlier this year when it disappointingly flopped and with The Bikeriders. The better way would have been to release Megalopolis like it had actually come out in the 1980s. At that point, if you missed a movie in cinemas, you didn’t know when or if it would be available on home video. If you wanted to be up to date with the culture, you had to see it. So people did. If Lionsgate had guts, they would have committed that Megalopolis wouldn’t release on streaming or home video for years, making that central to the marketing — that if you want to see the lifelong ambitious project of Francis Ford Coppola, you have to see it now. 

Maybe it still would have failed, but at least that would have given Megalopolis a chance. And if it had worked, other ambitious films would have followed. Instead, we get a Coppola revolution that wasn’t to be, a beautiful disaster.

Ross Anderson is the Life Editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.