Few names command as much respect as Francis Ford Coppola. He was one of the artistic pioneers of the 1970s who, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, reshaped the film industry after the collapse of Classical Hollywood. His movies have won a total of 14 Academy Awards and include such classics as The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Outsiders (1983), The Godfather Part III (1990), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997).

Despite his impressive list of masterpieces, there’s one movie that Coppola never got to make: Megalopolis. It’s Coppola’s passion project, what he apparently considers his magnum opus (which is really saying something coming from him), and one of the most famous unproduced films of all time. In fact, Coppola has been trying to make Megalopolis for decades. He first wrote it in the 1980s and spent the 1990s making studio films (including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack, and The Rainmaker) to get out of debt and save money to produce his passion project.

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Around the turn of the millennium, more than a decade after he had written the project, Coppola finally started pre-production on Megalopolis. He was able to assemble a cast and even shoot some test footage, but on September 11, 2001, it all ground to a halt. After the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the country was too devastated to see a movie set in and about New York City and would be for the foreseeable future.

Coppola gave up on the project and almost gave up on filmmaking entirely. In the next twenty years, he only directed three films — Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt — all of which were deeply personal and not aimed at a mass audience. One didn’t even receive a theatrical release. None of them grossed more than $3 million. Since Twixt in 2011, Coppola hasn’t made a single film. However, the director has finally come out of retirement to make the film he’s dreamed of for more than 40 years. With Coppola now 83 years old, Megalopolis could be his last — and, he hopes, greatest — movie.

Megalopolis: The Plot

     Pixabay

Details about Megalopolis’ plot are scarce. However, over the years, Francis Ford Coppola has described the film a few times. The basic premise goes like this: a terrible disaster strikes New York City, causing massive destruction. Meanwhile, an ambitious architect sees this as the perfect opportunity to rebuild the city according to his vision of a futuristic utopia. When he tries to do so, the city’s mayor refuses to allow it.

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Coppola said in a statement to Deadline in 2019 that the film would be “a major work utilizing all I have learned during my long career, beginning at age 16 doing theater, and that will be an epic on a grand scale.” He added, “It is unusual. . . It makes use of all of my years of trying films in different styles and types culminating in what I think is my own voice and aspiration. It is not within the mainstream of what is produced now.”

In another interview with Deadline this year, the director summarized the film as an “epic story of political ambition, genius and conflicted love” that will be set in “a modern world unable to solve its own social problems.”

The film will be influenced by Roman history as well. It is loosely based on an event known as the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 B. C., in which Lucius Sergius Catiline tried to assassinate and overthrow the leaders of the Roman Republic. Furthermore, the film will apparently be inspired by the Roman epic films of Cecil B. DeMille, best known for The Sign of the Cross, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments, as well as by William Wyler’s religious epic Ben-Hur.

Megalopolis: The Cast

     20th Century Studios

An impressive list of stars is attached to the project, befitting Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus. However, we don’t know the specifics of most of their characters. Of those on the cast list, the hottest star at the moment is Adam Driver (Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Marriage Story), so we can speculate that he might play the optimistic architect protagonist. He often plays artists or intellectuals in his movies, such as the theater director in Marriage Story or the history professor in White Noise, so this would fit with his star persona. Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, The Butler) is confirmed to be playing the film’s antagonist, the mayor of New York City.

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Beyond this, we are unsure who is playing whom, but the star-studded cast includes the following: Nathalie Emmanuel (Furious 7, Game of Thrones), Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy), Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, John Wick: Chapter 2), Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West), Talia Shire (Rocky, The Godfather), Shia LaBeouf (Honey Boy, Transformers), Jason Schwartzman (The Darjeeling Limited), Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth), James Remar (The Warriors), and Grace VanderWaal (Stargirl).

Release Date

Filming will take place in Georgia beginning in November and is expected to end in March 2023. Given this timeline, Megalopolis will likely release in 2024 at the earliest, perhaps even 2025. The film is independently financed, and it appears that most or all of the nearly $100 million budget has come from Francis Ford Coppola himself.

When asked by Deadline earlier this year if he’s worried about gambling so much of his own money on the project, Coppola replied:

“What’s the worst that can happen to me? I’m going to die and be broke? I’m not going to be broke.”