They’ve actually been at it for a little over a week. Shooting “megalopolis“It started after 40 years. In the sci-fi epic, New York was devastated by catastrophe. But an architect wants to see this as an opportunity. He wants to rebuild the city – but not in the old version, but as a gigantic, completely new utopia. This leads to a conflict with the arch-conservative mayor, who also has a private component. For the architect’s mistress is his rival’s daughter. And she herself is torn between loyalty to her father and her great love.
Francis Ford Coppola already wanted to realize ‘Megalopolis’ in the eighties. But his 1982 musical romance “One with a Heart” reached a milestone in movie history, introducing techniques that are still used today, but is also one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. It ruined Coppola’s company and him personally. For the remainder of the 1980s decade, he had to take most of the assignments to pay off his debts. No one there wanted to fund “Megalopolis” for him – mainly because many doubted that Coppola’s vision could be implemented at all.
9/11 prevented “Megalopolis”
Time and time again he tried to advance the film adaptation. In 2001 it finally seemed that far. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe and Nicolas Cage on board, everything was ready when the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook New York and the world. Faced with the tragic reality, Coppola found himself unable to make a film in which the destruction of the American metropolis plays such an important role, and canceled the project.
He’s been trying to revive it for years. Because the major Hollywood studios were hesitant to give an 80-year-old director, whose last really big blockbuster with 1992’s “Dracula” was no less than 30 years ago, the necessary budget, he sprang into action himself.
$100 million out of pocket
Coppola intended to self-fund the $120 million originally planned budget. He is said to have raised at least $100 million out of pocket – enough to get started. Among other things, he sold most of his winery. It’s a record. None of his films have ever been so expensive, a filmmaker has probably never spent so much of his own money to realize his idea.
He also wants to rely on revolutionary technology, most of which is still hidden. He is known to want to combine traditional filmmaking with LED technology, such as the one used in the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian”. While so much has yet to be shot in a brand new studio, the first images now show Coppola and his two central stars, Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza, on classic location shoots.
Star cast around Adam Driver on the trail of sci-fi super classic “Metropolis”
“Star Wars” villain Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza (“Child’s Play”) lead the illustrious cast. Among them are the two Oscar winners Forest Whitaker (“Rogue One”) and Jon Voight (“Mission: Impossible”) as well as Laurence Fishburne (“Matrix”), Shia LaBeouf (“Transformers”) and those of “Game Of Thrones” and “Fast & Furious’ announced Nathalie Emmanuel.
A lot of “Megalopolis” sounds like the already mentioned flop “One with a Heart”, in which Coppola also personally raised money (and went into huge debt) and used revolutionary technology. Fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen again. Incidentally, Coppola himself calls Fritz Langs “Metropolis” as a model for “Megalopolis” and pays tribute to it with his title. Finally, with the science fiction epic published in 1927, Lang also realized a unique vision that hardly anyone believed in. Today, it’s one of those sci-fi classics that gets cited over and over again.
However, there is one side that Coppola certainly does not want to repeat from his role model: ‘Metropolis’ became a commercial disaster, and the original film version was even destroyed afterwards. Only then did “Metropolis” develop its sci-fi classic status. Attempts at restoration went on for years, only in 2011 (!) a version appeared that came very close to Lang’s original version (which was long considered to be destroyed forever).
We’ll see how “Megalopolis” does and if Francis Ford Coppola manages to pull off another big hit that builds on previous masterpieces. The recordings now run until the spring of 2023. A theatrical release date formegalopolis“does not exist yet. While 2024 seems realistic on the surface, there are also reports that it could be as late as 2025 because the still-secret “revolutionary engineering approaches” involve such complex post-production that it could take more than a year.
Besides, there’s a lot more sci-fi actor with Adam Driver. In “65”, where our article image also comes from, he lands as a pilot of a starship on a planet that soon turns out to be not entirely unknown. The theatrical release is currently scheduled for March 9, 2023, but may be slightly delayed again. Here’s the trailer: