Francis Ford Coppola Re-enters a Changed Hollywood. It Could Be Rough. Mr. Coppola has spent $120 million on his new movie, “Megalopolis.” Most box office analysts predict that he’ll get far less in return.

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**By Brooks Barnes**

Reporting from Los Angeles

Sept. 26, 2024, 11:17 a.m. ET

Lionsgate executives say they have done all they can. They’ve booked 1,700 theaters, deployed guerrilla marketers to college campuses and pushed to flip negative reviews to their advantage. They have tied the film’s themes to the presidential race in TV ads.

And now it is up to moviegoers. Will people plunk down dollars and turn Francis Ford Coppola’s majestically bonkers “Megalopolis” into an against-all-odds success when it arrives on Friday?

Or will the $120 million epic — in keeping with months of negative prerelease headlines — go down as a hall-of-fame flop?

Most box office analysts are predicting disaster. “Megalopolis” could arrive to as little as $5 million in weekend ticket sales in North America, according to surveys that track audience interest. Ticket sales are split roughly 50-50 with theater owners.

But there are glimmers of hope. The film received a 10-minute standing ovation when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. On Monday, Lionsgate, which is distributing and marketing “Megalopolis” for a fee, staged a preview at IMAX theaters across the country, selling out locations in New York, California, Massachusetts, Utah and Florida. The stunt was an effort to position what is essentially a big-budget art film as a broad-audience blockbuster.

“We want everyone to come,” Mr. Coppola, 85, said during a Q. and A. that was part of the IMAX event, clasping his hands together in simulated prayer.

Mr. Coppola is on Hollywood’s version of Mount Rushmore. He has six Oscars, winning his first for writing “Patton” (1970) and once winning three in one night for writing, directing and producing “The Godfather Part II” (1974).

When no studio would finance “Apocalypse Now” (1979), he scraped together the money himself. He did the same thing with “Megalopolis,” selling part of his wine estate to raise funds — and he is hoping to have a similar result. “Apocalypse Now” cost $145 million to make and collected $500 million worldwide, after adjusting for inflation; it still generates sizable revenue on home video.

But the film business has changed dramatically since Mr. Coppola’s heyday, or even since the 1990s, when he last had a hit in theaters. (“Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” directed by Mr. Coppola and released in 1992, cost about $90 million to make and collected $500 million.) Back then, studio marketers could generate respectable opening-weekend results for almost any movie — good, bad, ugly — by running trailers and carpet-bombing NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads.

Now, in the streaming age, there is no longer a floor: No amount of marketing hocus-pocus can convince people that original movies with mixed-to-negative reviews are worth the hassle and expense of trekking to a theater. Just look at Lionsgate’s track record at the box office: Four of the studio’s films over the past two months have been dead on arrival. (Lionsgate often limits financial risk by selling off overseas rights.)

Mostly gone, too, are the days when movies could “open” to mediocre results and slowly amass substantial ticket sales over weeks and months. There is simply too much competition for leisure time, especially from streaming services.

Still, Lionsgate gave “Megalopolis” the hardest push it could muster. After bigger studios balked at distributing the film — even with Mr. Coppola shouldering 100 percent of the financial risk, including for distribution and marketing — Lionsgate stepped in with genuine enthusiasm. The studio also has a history with Mr. Coppola; it distributes several of his self-financed films, including “Apocalypse Now,” on home video.

“We loved the idea of taking this movie to a broad audience at this particular point in time,” JP Richards, president of worldwide theatrical marketing for the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, said in an interview. “‘Megalopolis’ is about a great debate — what should the future of our society be? And it comes at a time when we are having the same political debate in the real world.”
Mr. Richards’s team had its work cut out for it.
Hollywood marketers tend to use a playbook that begins with boiling a movie down to a single, salable genre. Is this a comedy or a drama? It can’t be both, they will tell you. Consumers want a clear idea of what they are getting. Strong reviews can help, but only to a degree.

But “Megalopolis” is unboilable. It’s an avant-garde, dystopian, science-fiction fable that veers into satire, fever dream, mystery, romance and comedy. Adam Driver plays a visionary architect who is determined to rebuild a decaying city called New Rome as a utopia. Giancarlo Esposito is the city’s mayor.

Jon Voight plays a wealthy buffoon with Donald J. Trump mannerisms. Shia LaBeouf spends a large part of the film in drag. (“Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress!”) Aubrey Plaza’s character is a maniacal television reporter named Wow Platinum but known as Money Bunny.

Theatre count is going drop next week when joker comes out.

I mean at the end of the day, Coppola is far richer than most people here and than even a lot of celebrities, directors, actors, etc.

If there’s one person who can take a bomb it’s him.