Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing epic Megalopolis will finally embark on its theatrical run this September, with a new trailer highlighting the movie that divided critics at film festivals upon its debut earlier this year.
Taking the offensive against the smattering of bad post-Cannes reviews, the trailer opens with a look back at the director’s career and similarly misguided critical assessments of Coppola’s previous masterpieces like The Godfather (“A sloppy, self-indulgent movie,” the Village Voice said at the time of release), Apocalypse Now (“A spectacular failure,” a reviewer said of the now-classic war film), and Dracula (“A beautiful mess).
“One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” Laurence Fishburne’s voiceover adds of Coppola’s legacy. After making its case that movie critics sometimes get it wrong, the trailer then launches into 90 seconds of actual Megalopolis footage.
“Megalopolis is a Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America,” Lionsgate Movies, which will distribute the film, said in its synopsis.
“The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”
Rolling Stone was among the publications that gave Megalopolis a positive review following its Cannes debut. “It’s a conceptual dream project that the filmmaker has been chasing for close to half of his life, and had he made and released this at any point in the early 21st century, it would have felt singular. In 2024, this personal, profound, perversely optimistic movie about slouching toward Utopia Now on a self-financed $120 million budget feels like a fucking unicorn,” David Fear wrote.
“It feels like a final statement of purpose, a summation of a lifetime’s worth of dreaming. And what is cinema but a canvas for dreamers? Whether Megalopolis makes a billion dollars or bupkiss is beside the point. So long as there are people who love movies that are actually about things, and think about the past 6,000 years of human civilization, there is an audience for this.”
Megalopolis arrives in theaters on September 27.