Francis Ford Coppola sold his winery and put up $120 million of his own money to fund what he imagined would be his magnum opus.
Magnum opus more like magnum flopus am i rite
There are reasons to appreciate the effort. He says he wanted to make this movie for all viewers, and so he cast cancelled actors like Jon Voight and Shia La Boeuf. Note that Voight was cancelled just for being a Republican and Shia La Boeuf was cancelled for allegedly abusing women. These are equally cancel-worthy sins in Hollywood.
But the movie is apparently self-indulgent to the extreme and, as one critic said, feels like a college sophomore took his first philosophy course and decided to write a screenplay.
As Blue Lou Albano says, that's as good as it gets and it won't ever get that good again.
In Francis Ford Coppola's allegorical, phantasmagorical fever-dream passion-project Megalopolis, Adam Driver portrays a visionary civic planner who can stop time with his mind and builds towering, surreally fluid cityscapes with the help of a mysterious substance called Megalon. Over the weekend, Ford's self-financed $136 million drama crumbled under the weight of its negative buzz, earning a paltry $4 million over its opening three days of release in 2,000 North American theaters.
To put that box-office return in perspective, Megalopolis ranked sixth behind Devara: Part 1, a three-hour Telugu-language action epic playing on about half as many screens. Moreover, such an underperformance fell wildly short of prerelease "tracking" estimates that had Ford's two-hour and 18-minute ensemble opus -- its cast includes Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, and Aubrey Plaza -- earning between $7 million and $10 million. Or, to put it another way, Megalopolis would have to continue selling tickets at the same rate for another 24 weeks, with no drop-off, to break even (not including its prints and advertising spend: another $30 million to $50 million).
Reputationally and financially, Megalopolis's 85-year-old writer-director-producer (and not the film's distributor Lionsgate) has the most to lose. The maverick American auteur behind Apocalypse Now and the Godfather trilogy began conjuring the movie's script back in the early '80s and borrowed $200 million against his Napa Valley winery business to personally bankroll Megalopolis's nine-figure budget when studio backers deemed the project too risky. Its production designer, visual effects supervisor, and supervising art director (in addition to the whole rank-and-file VFX team) quit during filming due to what has been characterized as an epic case of "creative differences" with Coppola. More damaging, background actresses came forward to accuse the octogenarian of repeated attempted nonconsensual on-set kissing during the filming of a Bacchanalian disco scene "to get them in the mood" (Coppola has strenuously denied the allegations). And a disastrous buyers' screening for 300 industry machers at Los Angeles's Universal City Walk IMAX in March left distributors pessimistic about Megalopolis's commercial prospects.
According to Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, however, focusing solely on Megalopolis's minuscule ticket sales and D+ CinemaScore may be missing the point. "That the movie even exists in theaters this weekend is kind of a miracle," Dergarabedian says. "I think a bold, swing-for-the-fences movie release should be celebrated."
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In post-pandemic, post-strike Hollywood, "Don't bring me your passion project," a producer behind a string of blockbusters tells me. "When I hear 'passion project,' I'm thinking, No fucking way. Nobody wants it. It's just gonna be some weird vanity thing that makes 25 cents [in] theatrical [release]. And I'm not doing the heavy lift."
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In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published before Megalopolis's megaflopolis, Coppola discussed a contingency plan for a "very useful" tax write-down if the movie flopped. "I'm very old, so it all goes into an estate plan," the director said.
Well, I think we would all like more movies which are based in actual passion and less on squeezing a YA reader IP until the blood turns to pudding.
But that passion must be tested by a question that Hollywood simply doesn't bother asking any longer, including in its corporate cashgrab would-be blockbusters:
Who is this for? Is there an actual audience for a videogame action movie starring 50 and 70 year old women, for example?
They just don't seem to care. Most of Hollywood is making movies not out of passion for the material but to satisfy some ideological propaganda goal and to appease 200 mentally-ill intellectually stunted savages on Twitter.
Speaking of:
You know what's really crazy?
When you direct a billion-dollar movie but critics and leftwingers (but I repeat myself) and Permanent Residents of Twitterstan say mean things about you like "You're inciting toxic manbabies!" and so you create a sequel not to please fans of your movie but to appease its worst, most toxic critics and then the fans hate it and the leftwing mob you tried to appease also hates it and now you've got a huge bomb on your hands.
While originally the new Joker sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux, seemed to be tracking a little bit behind the original, 61% critic scores compared to a 69% score, that has now changed drastically with more reviews pouring in for the sequel.
The film's scores have crashed all the way down to a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes one day ahead of its official release on October 4 (Update: now down to 39%). It's rare to see scores fall that much as more reviews come in past the initial batch, but critics are really not enjoying what they're seeing, it seems.
The film has been criticized for its story, musical numbers and extremely controversial ending, but mainly that it doesn't feel like it needs to exist at all.
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This low of a score means that it is far, far below that majority of DC offerings over the last decade or so. Here's the bottom ten list in that regard:
Aquaman -- 65%
The Flash - 63%
Wonder Woman 1984 -- 58%
Man of Steel -- 56%
Justice League (Whedon) -- 40%
Joker: Folie A Deux - 39%
Black Adam -- 39%
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom -- 33%
Batman V Superman -- 29%
Suicide Squad -- 26%
Lower than Josstice League. Ouch.
Apparently the movie is intended to Teach the CHUDs Who Liked the First Movie a lesson and turn Joker from a sympathetic wretch of an anti-hero into a pitiful loser that not even the CHUDs can like. Apparently the entire movie consists of calling the character a loser, literally -- there are times when other character berate him as a pathetic loser.
Many are calling Todd Phillips "spiteful" to the audience that made his movie a billion dollars in 2019 -- the sequel is a blunt insult to the old audience.
Always playing to that mythical Modern Audience that never actually shows up.
I have no dog in this fight -- I never bothered seeing the first one; I already saw and enjoyed Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, and I don't need to see a mash-up of those movies with a comic-book IP added to make it financially viable.
Todd Phillips' one stroke of genius was to see how King of Comedy -- a movie about a disrespected, unemployed, unfunny loser of failed comedian with mental health issues who turns criminal against a TV show host who mocked him in a bid for respect -- could be rewritten as a Joker movie.
Where did he get that brilliant idea from? How did he make that connection? He must have been visited by some galaxy-brained muse sent by God, because there's no way anything less than a divine genius could make the King of Comedy-Joker connection.
I mean, yeah, sure, it was part of the movie poster, but still.
The poster makes it explicit that the Talk Show Host is the king that the Joker needs to revenge himself on with a gun.
But a big part of creativity is just taking a movie and mixing in parts of that movie's promotional materials and bang, you've got yourself a highly original derivative work of art.
By the way, yes, the loser comic character from King of Comedy also has a fantasy relationship with a light-skinned black woman he has a crush on. Coincidentally enough.
And oh yeah: Yes, the sad, unfunny clown who uses a gun to take revenge on a talk show host becomes a media celebrity and a twisted folk hero at the end.
Yes I admit I didn't see the movie so I can't judge it but you have to admit -- I mean, it's the same frickin' movie.
Le Tigre? Magnum? Blue Steel? They're all the same face! Am I the only one who sees this? I feel like I'm taking crazy-pills over here!
BTW, do see King of Comedy! It's unbearable cringe, but gripping. And often darkly, sadly funny. This is why I just don't want to see Joker -- I saw it already, I saw the real version.
Anyway, I have no attachment to this version of Joker. I don't care if they trash this version of the Joker character. I barely care about the real Joker.
But it is weird that Todd Phillips let the Media Mean Girls clique bully him into losing the $200 million cost of this movie and making a box-office disaster to show his penance for his earlier success.
People really are weird, weak losers tormented by a society of aggressively-sub-mediocre fools and monsters, aren't they? I guess Joker 2's moral is true.
Here is some Is This Something? content, skewed towards the spooky.
This might be scary.
I hear Barbarian -- which was made by the same guy who did the movie above -- is very scary. But it sounds grim.
I usually can't take grim-scary any longer. I more want fun-scary.
Some YouTube idiot just played what I assume is the scary climax of Barbarian in a video without putting up a spoiler warning, so now that's ruined for me.
No but really, someone played the real climax. I wouldn't do that to you.
The new Clint Eastwood movie isn't a spooky movie, but it does have a scary premise: What if you were out driving in the rain and hit something you never even saw?
What if you then were summoned for jury duty for the murder of a woman who was killed and dumped beside the road?
What if you then began to suspect that you're actually the killer of that woman?
That's the kind of thing I don't like thinking about so I don't know if I'll be rushing to see this. Looks well-done, though.
They remade Salem's Lot. Again. They remade it in the 90s with Rob Lowe. (But with Rutger Hauer and Donald Sutherland as the vampires.)
It debuted on Max last night.
I have no idea if it's any good. Mr. H claimed that reviewers said it was "fun" but also "almost a comedy." He had previously reported rumors that the movie had been very poorly received in test screenings -- a couple of years ago, I think -- and was deemed "unsalvageable." Maybe that's why it's being released on HBO Max instead of into theaters. I don't know. These were rumors. I know nothing about this, except that I really like the choice of song for the trailer.
But Suicide Squad had a good trailer song, too.
BTW, you can buy the original Tobe-Hooper-directed 1970s TV movie version of it. I got it on Amazon for like $6. You can probably rent it for $4. It's definitely a 1970s TV movie in terms of camerawork, but it has some very good -- famous, even -- scary moments.
This is spooky -- and true: