I saw a trailer for Megalopolis before a showing of Trap last week, and it got me hyped by taking the route that normal trailers do: showing shots from the movie. But Megalopolis, with its mouthful of a name, massive independent budget, and huge personal stakes, is anything but a normal film, and the new trailer released and then quickly pulled on Wednesday further reflects its bizarre existence.
While the trailer I saw in the theater only mentioned him in passing, Megalopolis is all about its director, Francis Ford Coppola. The man behind some of the greatest films of the '70s, some very good films in the '80s and '90s, and some mostly forgotten low-budget experiments since then, is now 85 years old and finally realizing this longtime passion project, which apparently connects the fall of Rome with modern-day society. The production of Megalopolis has been variously delayed through the years by the damage from Coppola's box-office flops, 9/11, and the unwillingness of studios to back his singular (for better or worse) vision. But thanks to the success of his winery, Coppola was eventually able to put up the money himself and fund his film on a scale few independent directors could ever imagine.
Coppola's legacy and day-to-day comfort are not exactly at risk here, but there's still an invigorating level of danger in Megalopolis's release—the very real possibility that it only makes back a tiny percentage of its budget, or that, after a disjointed reception at Cannes, it lands with a thud among those theatergoers who do go out of their way to see it. For a specific kind of movie fan, Megalopolis is an event because of one man's passion—a defiant contrast to the weightless, frictionless, boardroom-built crossover events that are more often produced for this kind of price tag. If you want to attend a screening, it's because you wish to immerse yourself in an auteur's undiluted vision. But there's something much weirder happening around Megalopolis.
This quickly scuttled ad is built entirely around a defensive, anti-critic posture. The idea is basically Screw you, he's Francis Ford Coppola. If you trust the critics who don't like it, you'll look foolish later. The trailer bolsters this argument with negative quotes from several critics on Coppola's most beloved works, and also Dracula. The only problem, as noted by Vulture, was that none of these quotes actually appeared in those reviews. Their origins are either totally mysterious—Pauline Kael loved The Godfather!—or taken from other places, like Roger Ebert's review of the Tim Burton Batman, which gets repurposed here as a Dracula pan.
While the absurdity of the fabricated quotes probably brought more attention to Megalopolis than traditional marketing, the speed with which the U.S. distributor Lionsgate apologized and tried to take it down suggests that this is neither a planned troll job nor a Dylanesque attempt to embody the themes of the film. Rather, the most likely explanation is that some idiot used ChatGPT as a search engine, it made up or misattributed these quotes, and nobody bothered to check them. That reflects terribly on the marketing team, but it's also, honestly, a little bit funny to think of the Megalopolis gang as a football team convinced that they're owning some imaginary haters with every touchdown. I picture the future release of behind-the-scenes features where people strut into the edit bay with "American Zoetrope Against The World" T-shirts, or where someone from the lighting crew shouts "Put some respect on our name!” into a camera. After the interminable grind that went into this theatrical release, Coppola has perhaps earned a certain amount of pettiness, and that's rubbed off on the marketing.
As much as I want to laugh and even cheer this anti-establishment production lurching to the finish line while defying all of 2024's accepted wisdom about nine-figure features ... you can't lie about what people have said. It's not just unethical; inventing haters is lame. But much worse than the trailer blunder is that it's a reminder of the uglier side of Megalopolis's production. Just beneath the film's shiny surface are the abuse allegations against Shia LaBeouf, or accusations of Coppola's nonconsensual kissing on set, or even just the terrible experience that many of the crew had. That Megalopolis came into existence so miraculously, and that its potential success would be a middle finger to studio execs, does not excuse any of this. Its promotion of an alternative to the current system of mainstream filmmaking means its standards should be above the sludge of corporate Hollywood—not just in the final on-screen product, but in all the work that goes into creating it. The substance of Megalopolis, the movie, is still a mystery. But as a project, it already feels like a disappointment.
