For those who have been looking forward to Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic film Megalopolis, you’re unfortunately likely to wait quite awhile longer. According to a new exclusive report from The Hollywood Reporter, the years-long production of the film has all but descended into utter chaos, and the future of it currently looks very uncertain.
The premise of the film Megalopolis centers around an architect who wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia after a devastating disaster, and his lover is caught in the middle of an ongoing feud between him and her father, who believes in classical view of society. The film has been shooting in Atlanta since last November, and is currently about halfway through the schedule with a deadline in March. Coppola lined up an exceptionally star-studded cast including Adam Driver (Star Wars, A Marriage Story), Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones), Forest Whitaker (Black Panther), Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad), Laurence Fishburne (John Wick), and Jason Schwartzman (The French Dispatch), just to name a few.
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Despite seemingly having all the cards finally lined up, production on the film has reportedly come to a grinding halt. Costs are ballooning out of control, and a crew exodus of sorts has been happening, with numerous essential creatives either resigning or being fired, eerily reminiscent of the infamous Apocalypse Now (1979) production disaster. So far, production designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott have walked out, citing inescapable financial and production challenges.
The film has been harnessing the same LED technology used in Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022) and The Mandalorian series, which in and of itself is odd. Coppola has never been one to use special effects in his films, and yet he decided to go that route this time. However, that plan has now seemed to backfire tremendously. The financial cost and challenge of the technology has spiraled to the point that the crew is now opting for a more traditional green screen approach, and yet Coppola reportedly decided to fire nearly the entire visual effects team last December, including effects supervisor Mark Russell. That decision has left the production with no art department.
Despite all of these setbacks, which definitely makes for some disastrous PR, Coppola remains determined to see the film through. He’s reportedly hiring new staff to replace all those lost, and has a personal obligation to finish this passion project that’s taken decades to get off the ground. Having personally financed all $120 million of the film’s budget and now forced to spend even more, the Oscar-winning director has to ride out the storm and hope that, like the architect in his story, he can rebuild his dream and see it finished.
“There’s no good answer here…[Coppola] is going to spend a lot more money than he intended. You can imagine how much he’s already got invested. It would be a very bitter pill not to finish it.”
Francis Coppola’s Long History of Chaotic Productions That Still Led to Oscars
Paramount Pictures
Megalopolis isn’t the only film in Coppola’s repertoire that was a production calamity. While The Godfather (1972), considered one of the greatest films of all time, was an expensive and challenging production per Coppola’s mantra of no special effects or technology, it was nothing compared to one other film of his.
Considered the absolute pinnacle of disaster in his entire career was the epic war film Apocalypse Now (1979). Between controversies with the Humane Society over a slaughtered animal, buying actual corpses from grave robbers in the Philippines, on-set conflicts between high-profile actors Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper, and again an out of control budget that had United Artists take out a life insurance policy against Coppola, it was nothing short of a miracle that the Vietnam War period film made it to an actual release. Despite the chaos and heartache, the film went on to earn an Oscar among many other awards, and has cemented itself as one of the most important war films in history.
