Francis Ford Coppola has at least one more film in him after Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola is kind of the poster child for the hustle culture mindset. The director may have spent 40-odd years developing his humongous, self-funded epic, Megalopolis, but that doesn’t mean he’s quitting the business altogether when it finally sees the light of day. “One way I knew Megalopolis was finished is that I’ve begun work on a new film,” he told Deadline in advance of the project’s first ever screening for distributors and various Hollywood elite yesterday morning. “It won’t be cheap by any means, but I don’t know it can be called ‘an epic film.’”

Megalopolis certainly can. Coppola has been writing and rewriting the script obsessively ever since the idea first took root in his brain on the set of his classic 1979 film, Apocalypse Now. After shelving and then reviving project after 9/11, selling off a significant portion of his wine empire to fund it, and apparently losing 75 pounds to improve his stamina and continue the work, production officially began in 2022. Even then, the process wasn’t without its woes, with reports of chaos on set, mass crew turnover, and consistently changing budgets.

For better or worse, the film’s long, long journey is finally almost complete. Starring 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 (whew!), Megalopolis is literally Coppola’s Roman Empire. Inspired by that great fall, the film centers around the destruction of a New York-esque utopian society that’s struggling to adapt to the future. Leading the conflict are an idealistic architect named Cesar (Driver) and his nemesis, Mayor Frank Cicero (Esposito), with the mayor’s socialite daughter, Julia (Emmanuel) trapped in the middle.

So with all this in mind, is the movie actually any good? Initial reactions have been… mixed, to say the least. Deadline wrote that it was “crackling with ideas that fuse the past with the future, with an epic and highly visual fable that plays perfectly on an IMAX screen.” Puck News, however, reported that the film was “unflinching in how batshit crazy it is” (not in a good way) and that the climax was “one of the most baffling” two separate sources had “ever seen.” The rest of the world will get to see for themselves when (and if) the film officially secures a distributor.