Lionsgate has released a new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis front-loaded with scathing reviews for The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Have a look:
As Laurence Fishburne narrates, “one filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” suggesting audiences should ignore Megalopolis‘s divisive reviews and be on the right side of history, for once. It’s a clever marketing campaign that mirrors the “guess you guys aren’t ready for this, but your kids are gonna love it,” theme of the movie, itself.
So what the hell is Megalopolis even about, you ask? Essentially, it’s a picaresque mash-up of The Fountainhead, Metropolis, and Caligula, in which a fallen Soviet satellite levels an alternate version of New York City inspired by ancient Rome. Referencing the players of the Catilinarian conspiracy, a sci-fi architect named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) attempts to rebuild the city as a utopia of his own design, but Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) stands in his way. Reflecting the fall of the Roman Empire with the fall of the United States, Mayor Cicero benefits from things being exactly the way they are and damn the rest of us. So what’s a visionary to do?
A long-gestating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola’s, Megalopolis is said to have been initially conceived in 1977 and was set to go before cameras in 2001, before the events of 9/11 temporarily soured him on the project. In 2019, Coppola sold off a portion of his winery to personally raise its $120 million budget. It’s the movie the 85-year old director has always wanted to make.
Since no one at io9 has seen Megalopolis yet, we cannot comment on the film’s quality ourselves, but initial reviews have been polarizing. Some have hailed it as Copolla’s masterpiece whereas others have described it as “a bloated mess of philosophizing and incomplete plot lines.” Interesting, right?
Currently slated for a September 27 release in both theaters in IMAX, Megalopolis stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, Dustin Hoffman, and Aubrey Plaza—who plays a financial advisor named Wow Platinum. Incredible stuff.
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