Megalopolis

Plot

In an alternate United States, New Rome is dominated by an elite group of patrician families. Although the Roman elite profess to live by a strict moral code, patricians decadently enjoy forbidden pleasures while ordinary Romans live in poverty.

Patrician architect Cesar Catilina is one of New Rome's leading figures. Cesar wins the Nobel Prize for inventing the revolutionary building material Megalon. In addition, he can secretly stop time. Despite Cesar's worldly success, he has fallen into alcoholism. Years earlier, his wife disappeared, and District Attorney Franklyn Cicero prosecuted him for murdering her. Although Cesar was acquitted, he remains crushed by guilt, believing his wife took her own life because he was too focused on his work. Cesar pines for his wife, prompting his jealous mistress, TV presenter Wow Platinum, to leave him.

At a televised event, Cesar and now-Mayor Cicero offer different visions for the city's future. Cesar proposes using Megalon to build "Megalopolis", a utopian urbanist community, while Cicero argues that a casino will provide immediate tax revenue. Cesar meets Cicero's well-read but purposeless daughter Julia. Earlier, she watched Cesar stop time while a building was being demolished but was still able to move. Initially, they dislike each other, but Cesar impresses Julia with his vision for Megalopolis, explaining that New Rome needs a grand artistic vision to free itself from its political inertia and unlock its full potential. Later, when Cesar cannot stop time as he once could, Julia encourages him to do so for her. They discover they can stop time when together, and the two become lovers.

Wow marries Cesar's uncle Hamilton Crassus III, the world's richest man. Although Crassus likes his nephew, his mind and health are in decline, and he is easily manipulated by individuals like his other nephew, Clodio Pulcher, who wants to inherit the Crassus bank. Crassus and Wow throw a decadent wedding reception. The headliner is teenage pop star Vesta Sweetwater, who appeals to New Rome's puritanical sensibilities by promising to remain chaste until marriage. To neutralize Cesar, Pulcher leaks a paparazzi video of Cesar having sex with Vesta, prompting Cicero to condemn Cesar. Although Cicero arrests Cesar for statutory rape, Julia exonerates Cesar by discovering that Vesta faked her age and is actually in her twenties.

Soviet satellite Carthage crashes to Earth, destroying much of New Rome. Cesar begins building Megalopolis in the ruins, financing the project with his family fortune. In a press conference, he makes the case for bold artistic projects that show people that a better world is possible. However, the cost of building Megalopolis contrasts with poverty on the streets. Pulcher becomes a populist politician, encouraging ordinary Romans to oppose Megalopolis as an expensive folly. The allure of power draws Pulcher from populism to fascist demagoguery.

Production

Development

Growing up in New York City, Francis Ford Coppola was fascinated by science fiction films, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come (1936), and the scientific community's history with dangerous experiments. His reading of the Roman historian Sallust and William Bolitho Ryall's book Twelve Against the Gods (1929) inspired him to make a film about Lucius Sergius Catiline, a populist accused by Roman consul Marcus Tullius Cicero of conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC. Coppola conceived the overall idea for Megalopolis towards the end of filming Apocalypse Now (1979) in 1977. Sound designer Richard Beggs described Coppola's vision as an opera screened over four nights, similar to Richard Wagner's Ring cycle (1876) in Bayreuth, in a "gigantic outdoor purpose-built theatre". Coppola hoped to have it in "some place as close as possible to the geographical center of the United States", like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in the state of Colorado.

Coppola devoted the beginning of 1983 to developing the film; in two months, he assembled four hundred pages of notes and script fragments. Over the next four decades, he collected notes and newspaper clippings for scrapbooks detailing intriguing subjects he envisioned incorporating into a future screenplay, like political cartoons and different historical subjects, before deciding to make a Roman epic film set in an imagined modern America. In mid-1983, he described the plot as taking place in one day in New York City with Catiline-era Rome as a backdrop, similar to how James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) used Homer in the context of modern Dublin and how he updated the setting of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) from the late 1800s amid European colonial rule in Africa to the 1970s Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now.

In January 1989, Coppola announced his plans to move to Italy to work on two productions in the next five years, including Le Ribellion di Catilina, a film "so big and complicated it would seem impossible", which biographer Michael Schumacher said "sounded much like what he had in store for Megalopolis". It was to be shot in Cinecittà, a film studio in Rome, where production designer Dean Tavoularis and his design team built offices and an art studio for drafters to storyboard the film. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "swing[ing] from the past to the present", merging "the images of Rome ... with the New York of today". Of it, Coppola said, "I want to be free. I don't want producers around me telling me what to do". Coppola ultimately did not move to Italy, and instead made The Godfather Part III (1990). Following the 1990–91 film awards season for that film, Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope, announced several projects in development, including plans to film Megalopolis in 1991, despite lacking a finished script. However, the film was postponed to "no earlier than 1996" after Coppola found himself prioritizing other projects, including Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Jack (1996), and The Rainmaker (1997), to get out of debt accumulated from the box-office failures of One from the Heart (1982) and Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).

Pre-production

On April 3, 2019, the day before his 80th birthday, Coppola announced his return to the project, having completed the script and approached Jude Law and Shia LaBeouf for lead roles. In 2021, Coppola sold his Sonoma County wineries to merge his winery business with that of another Napa-based family company, Delicato Family Wines, in an equity deal worth around $650 million. He then borrowed $200 million against his ownership stake in Delicato to fund Megalopolis for $120 million and pay for other projects at Inglenook and Sentinel Building. By August, discussions with actors to star in the film had begun; James Caan was set to star after petitioning Coppola to write him a cameo role as a potential swan song, while Cate Blanchett, Oscar Isaac, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jon Voight, Forest Whitaker, and Zendaya were in various stages of negotiations.

In late 2021, Nathalie Emmanuel auditioned over Zoom while filming The Invitation (2022) in Budapest. During the session, Coppola had her participate in an acting exercise, tasking her with reciting a line from Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1982) in as many different contexts. By March 2022, Talia Shire (Coppola's sister) expressed her interest in joining the cast and Isaac was reported to have passed on the project. By May, Emmanuel, Voight, and Whitaker were confirmed for the cast, with Adam Driver and Laurence Fishburne added. Coppola was reassured Driver was "his kind of actor" after hearing an anecdote from Martin Scorsese about Driver's method acting for Silence (2016). Driver originally demurred from accepting the lead role, but reconsidered after Coppola incorporated ideas they developed together. After Caan died on July 6, 2022, his role was given to Dustin Hoffman.

In August 2022, Kathryn Hunter, Aubrey Plaza, James Remar, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's nephew), and Grace VanderWaal joined the cast, with LaBeouf and Shire confirmed as part of it. Plaza had to forgo attending a chemistry read due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as she was in Italy working on the second season of The White Lotus. She was then invited to audition similarly to Emmanuel over Zoom on March 27, 2022 (Coppola was readying to go to the 94th Academy Awards to receive an honor), while staying at the San Domenico, the same hotel in Sicily that Coppola resided in during the filming of The Godfather (1972). Before the meeting, Coppola emailed her the entire script and asked her to consider the role of "Wow Platinum", wanting an actress with a similar screen presence to Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy in screwball comedies from the 1930s. Coppola came up with the character's name after meeting a Southern woman whose great-grandmother's name "evolved" to "Wow" due to her beauty. For her performance, Plaza was inspired by Faye Dunaway in Network (1976) and Nicole Kidman in To Die For (1995).

Filming

Principal photography began on November 7, 2022, in Fayetteville, Georgia, at Trilith Studios and concluded on March 11, 2023. Filming also took place in Atlanta. It was to be the first film shot on Trilith Studios' Prysm Stage, an LED virtual production volume, but due to budget constraints, the production pivoted to a "less costly, more traditional greenscreen approach". The decision to film in Georgia over the film's setting of New York was due to available tax benefits, studio facilities, local crews, and classical buildings to act as sets. Around July 2023, close to when editing began, additional content was shot on the Italy–Switzerland border.

For the production of Megalopolis, Coppola purchased a Days Inn drive-in motel in Peachtree City, Georgia, for $4.35 million to house the crew and his extended family. He renovated the property to include rehearsal and post-production facilities, which increased the tax incentives available to the project and reportedly reduced the overall production expenditure to $107 million. The site was later opened to the public on July 5, 2024, as the All-Movie Hotel, a hybrid hospitality and filmmaking venue serving as the first U.S. location in Coppola's Hideaway hotel collection and fifth overall. The All-Movie Hotel features 27 suites and rooms personally designed by Coppola, along with a range of production facilities intended for projects of varying scales. These include modular post-production spaces such as two edit suites with laser projection and Meyer Sound 2.1 monitoring, two additional edit bays, ADR recording capabilities, and a screening room equipped for Dolby Atmos 9.1.6 sound mixing. The property also houses offices, a wardrobe fitting room, a gym, a swimming pool, and an insert stage. Coppola's own residential suite from the production of Megalopolis is available for guests to book, and memorabilia from his past films is displayed throughout the hotel.

The cinematographer was Mihai Mălaimare Jr., who shot Coppola's Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011). The crew utilized two Arri Alexa 65s and one Alexa LF for high-speed frame rate for the first unit and an Alexa Mini LF for the second unit. Panavision provided the lenses, including wide Sphero 65s, Panaspeeds, and specialty lenses such as the 200 mm and 250 mm detuned Primo Artiste, rehoused Helios, and Lensbaby for specific scenes. The primary aspect ratio was 2:1, a tribute to Vittorio Storaro's Univisium, with select scenes changing to a 1.43:1 aspect ratio. To capture authenticity from the actors, Coppola instructed Mălaimare to keep the camera rolling after he said "cut". Some male actors wore Caesar haircuts to evoke ancient Rome. For Plaza, the last two weeks of the shoot overlapped with her role on the Disney+ television miniseries Agatha All Along (2024). As they were shot on the same lot, she was allowed to do both. Plaza and Schwartzman were also recording for Netflix anime Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023) around the same time; Plaza would refer to Schwartzman as his Scott Pilgrim character on the Megalopolis set. In August 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, the film received an interim agreement from the union, possibly for reshoots or publicity purposes to qualify for festival screenings and distribution deals. The final film includes footage shot in 2001, consisting of establishing shots of New York City and minimal video of the September 11 attacks out of respect for the families of the victims.

Alleged conflicts on set

Plaza spoke about Coppola's spontaneous approach to filmmaking, explaining that he would often come up with new ideas on the spot. At times, this resulted in sudden location changes and unexpected shifts in the day's shooting plans, leaving actors unaware of what to expect as the day unfolded. Some crew members described that approach as "exasperating" and "old-school", as Coppola was hesitant to decide how the film would look and would spend work days completing shots practically instead of relying on digital techniques. A crew member recounted that Coppola frequently arrived on set in the mornings before major sequences without a clear plan. Since he refused to let his collaborators establish one, he often spent hours in his trailer, avoiding communication and reportedly smoking marijuana. When he eventually emerged, he would improvise scenes that disregarded prior discussions and the script, leaving the crew to adapt. On Driver's first day on set, Coppola allegedly took six hours to achieve an effect by projecting an image on the side of Driver's head. Coppola denied smoking marijuana on set, adding that he had been avoiding the substance ever since his weight loss in 2017.

On December 9, 2022, Coppola fired most of the visual effects team, with the rest of the department, including supervisor Mark Russell, soon following. In January 2023, reports indicated the budget ballooned higher than its initial $120 million, which The Hollywood Reporter compared to Coppola's history of challenging productions, most notoriously Apocalypse Now. Due to an alleged "unstable filming environment", a claim Coppola and Driver contested, other crew members exited the film, including production designer Beth Mickle and art director David Scott, along with the art department. Coppola replaced Russell with his nephew, Jesse James Chisholm, over a dispute over "live special effects", which he completed with his son and second unit director Roman Coppola as they had with Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Coppola further explained that he hired Mickle for her work in recreating 1950s New York for Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn (2019) but that creative differences formed "to a degree that it was decided that the best thing would be if I hired a concept artist and came up with frames that showed what I wanted, which I did". Working with concept artist Dean Sherriff to translate his vision through keyframe concept art, which he described as similar in style to that of a woven mural or tapestry, he permitted minimal input from the art department, whose practices, having recently completed the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), he deemed conventional, expensive, and hierarchical. "The art department was frustrated because they felt I was evolving the look of the picture independently of them", he said, "They wanted giant sets and images. I wanted other elements like costumes and live effects to do some of the work and have it not all be art-department-centric. So, there was disagreement along those lines". Coppola had originally set $100 million for the budget and $20 million as contingency. As the budget was at risk of rising to $148 million (which he said would have "bankrupted me and my family"), he laid off one of five art directors, leading the entire team to resign. Production allegedly wrapped a week ahead of schedule, with the budget close to the planned $120 million, according to Coppola. In contrast, one person involved with the film told The Wall Street Journal that production costs ultimately reached $136 million.

Post-production

The son of a classical musician who wrote pieces for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Coppola wanted a non-Hollywood composer. In March 2003, he hand-wrote a letter to Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, and afterward invited him to his home to discuss Megalopolis, asking him to compose a symphony that would have dictated the film's rhythm. They would go on to collaborate on Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt before returning to complete Megalopolis. Golijov wanted the score to "blur the line between music and sound design." Given the ambiguity surrounding how the city and music of Rome sounded, he relied on Hollywood portrayals and composed a Roman suite inspired by Miklós Rózsa's score for Ben-Hur (1959). Coppola also asked Golijov to write a love theme in the vein of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's composition Romeo and Juliet (1870). In February 2024, Coppola recorded the score with the Budapest Art Orchestra in Budapest, Hungary. The suite was eventually played in concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti on November 7-9, 2024.

Post-production, from editing to visual effects, was completed at the All-Movie Hotel, where some reshoots were held. Cam McLauchlin and Glen Scantlebury edited the film, Coppola having contacted McLauchlin after seeing his work on Nightmare Alley (2021). McLauchlin defined Coppola's style as theatrical, incorporating theater warm-up techniques. During rehearsal, Cesar and Julia improvised a tug-of-war with an imaginary rope, a spontaneous moment encouraging them to embrace the script's eccentricity. McLauchlin and Scantlebury were tasked to work on scenes independently but transitioned toward collaboration after realizing they had enough time to keep pace with shooting and experiment with alternate versions. As they edited the film, Coppola was inspired to direct more "unusual takes" of the cast to include. For a catwalk scene, Coppola mitigated disruptive noise by pre-recording the dialogue and playing it over a loudspeaker for wide shots. As an apparent warm-up exercise, he then had Driver recite the full "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet (1623). After filming wrapped, Coppola handed McLauchlin the first half of the film and Scantlebury the latter half, allowing them to trade sections to complete the edit. After Scantlebury moved on to another project, McLauchlin and Coppola continued editing for eight more months, during which Coppola suggested including the Shakespeare scene. In addition to starring, VanderWaal, a musician who won America's Got Talent at age 12 in 2016, wrote two original songs for the film.

Themes

Rome's example for America

Megalopolis is both a modern retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy and a revisionist look at the source material. Coppola described the film as a commentary on the American political system, reasoning that the Roman analogy was appropriate because the American Founding Fathers borrowed from Roman law to develop their democratic government without a king. He specifically noted that America was vulnerable to the same political forces and tensions that destroyed the Roman Republic and created the Empire.

Megalopolis was not the first time Coppola had sought to modernize a historical narrative: he had previously updated the colonial-Africa setting of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now (1979). Nor was it the first time that an artist had offered a revisionist look at Catiline: Henrik Ibsen's play Catiline reimagined Catiline as a "highly principled [man] pitted against the corruption of the world in which he lived".

The two male leads in Megalopolis directly reference the opposing sides in the Catilinarian conspiracy. Protagonist Cesar Catilina is a double reference to populist politician Lucius Sergius Catilina (anglicized to Catiline), who plotted to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC, and his occasional political ally Julius Caesar. Antagonist Franklyn Cicero references Catiline and Caesar's political rival, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the leader of the Roman conservatives and the consul (head of the Roman government) during the conspiracy. Although Caesar was not implicated in the conspiracy, he famously sought to prevent Catiline's execution.

Several supporting characters were also based on Roman notables. Cesar Catilina's mentor Hamilton Crassus references Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men in Rome and a power broker who facilitated Caesar's rise to the Roman dictatorship. Catilina's enemy Clodio Pulcher references Publius Clodius Pulcher, a patrician turned populist demagogue who sponsored a counter-reaction to Cicero's punishment of Catiline's supporters; in addition, the manner of Clodio's death in the film is a possible allusion to the death of Benito Mussolini. Pop star Vesta Sweetwater and her chastity pledge reference the Vestal Virgins, Roman priestesses who swore an oath to remain chaste for 30 years. The real-life Catiline was accused of seducing a Vestal Virgin, an offense punishable by death.

Not every character name was an allusion to ancient Rome. Coppola came up with the "Wow Platinum" name after hearing about a woman who was nicknamed "Wow" for her great beauty.

Artistic idealism as antidote to polarization

In 2008, Coppola stated that the character of Cesar Catilina would be inspired by the life of urban planner Robert Moses, who built much of the infrastructure of modern-day New York City, but was criticized for favoring wealthy political interests and ignoring the needs of New York's ethnic minorities. Coppola said that he wanted to imagine an "enlightened" version of Moses that preserved Moses's desire to build a better city.

Megalopolis argues that for a democracy to avoid falling into fascism, it needs a bold and inspirational vision for the future, which artists can help provide. In 1999, Coppola said that "Rome didn't fall for a long time. But how does an Empire die? It dies when its people no longer believe in it". In 2022, Coppola said his film would offer an optimistic look at humanity and the intuitive goodness in people even in a divided climate. He criticized fellow New York Military Academy alumnus Donald Trump for calling Mexicans criminal rapists, saying that "dictators and populists stay in power by having you hate someone else. ... [P]eople are in the habit of saying all people are bad ... We're doing...better. We could be proud of being human beings".

The film concludes with Cesar Catilina delivering an impassioned speech that persuades the public to embrace the vision of Megalopolis. Writing for The New Yorker, Justin Chang observed that Coppola's struggle to complete the film without studio interference lent the narrative an unintended layer of self-reflection. He described Megalopolis as an artistic defense of beauty and ambition, arguing that its existence was a statement of hope. Coppola himself acknowledged the value of visionary ideas but rejected the notion that Catilina's project should prescribe a specific vision of the future, asserting instead that utopia is not a fixed destination but an ongoing conversation.

Art versus politics

In addition to Moses, Coppola based the character of Cesar Catilina and his invention of Megalon on the novels of Ayn Rand. Catilina specifically resembles two Rand characters who struggle to implement their ideas in the face of the dominant political establishment, which may be either conservative or left-wing. In The Fountainhead (1943), modernist architect Howard Roark struggles to be taken seriously by a conservative artistic establishment that insists on aping the architecture of ancient Rome. In Atlas Shrugged (1957), visionary inventor Hank Rearden creates a high-performance metal alloy, which is subsequently nationalized by a left-wing government. Megalopolis depicts Cesar Catilina's modernist utopia under simultaneous attack by the left and the right: Cicero's conservatives reject Catilina's bold vision as fanciful, while Pulcher's radicals deride Catilina's ideas as pointlessly extravagant. Writing in The New York Times, Ross Douthat commented that "the central conflict isn't really left versus right .... Instead, [Megalopolis] pits Catilina ... against various forces representing inertia and sterility: the uncomprehending establishment and the ungrateful masses, ... all ranged against the man of genius".

During the press tour, Coppola said that he was interested in telling a story about a man who "would have brought something wonderful," until "what usually happens happened—the traditional forces subdued the new idea." He used the character of Mayor Cicero to demonstrate how "a conservative and a classicist" opposes an "enlightened artist", adding that Cicero was "committed to a regressive status quo" that puts greed and partisan politics over the public good. He concluded that although Cicero "truly wants to save the city", he embodied "despair" instead of hope for a better society, and no longer entertains "transformative ideas". Coppola compared Cicero to several mayors of New York City (mainly Ed Koch, but also David Dinkins at one point).

Although Coppola's press statements largely focused on Cicero over Pulcher, Den of Geek noted that Pulcher "serves as the Trump stand-in" and that "it's unclear if Coppola's trying to evoke the opulence of the Roman ruling classes or Trump's obsession with spray tans and hair-pieces or both". The Sweet East (2023) screenwriter Nick Pinkerton expressed concern that Pulcher's rapid recruitment of working-class populists implied that "the plebeians [are] easily manipulated rubes, a curious omission in a movie that's positioned as a humanist hymn to our species' higher potential".

Release

Distribution

Coppola saw Megalopolis in full for the first time on an IMAX screen at the headquarters of IMAX Corporation in Playa Vista, Los Angeles. The film used camera technology for certain sequences that could cover an entire IMAX screen. On March 28, 2024, a private screening was presented to distributors at the Universal CityWalk IMAX Theater in Hollywood. Coppola and his longtime attorney Barry Hirsch, a producer on the film, said they would not decide where to debut the film until they secured a distribution partner and a firm rollout plan. However, the "muted" response to the screening made securing a distributor difficult. Studios weighed the return on investment, as Coppola expected a print-and-advertising (P&A) campaign of $80–100 million and for producers to receive half of the film's revenues. A distribution veteran suggested that "If [Coppola] is willing to put up the P&A or backstop the spend, I think there would be a lot more interested parties".

Coppola's plan to forgo a sales agent was, thus, altered, with Goodfellas handling international sales; Le Pacte, for France, became the first to acquire distribution rights to a foreign market in late April. Variety noted that individual territories were not given rights to paid video on demand or streaming options, "perhaps by design to lure a big streaming service" into buying the streaming rights after its theatrical run. On May 15, Variety reported on sources that said Coppola was seeking an "awards-savvy distributor", such as A24, to release Megalopolis in the fourth quarter of 2024 so it could have an awards season campaign, but that "some potential indie outfits" who saw the film did not envision "much Oscars potential beyond technical categories" and "fear[ed] that Coppola [would] be an overly demanding partner".

On May 16, 2024, the 138-minute film premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or. At the film's Cannes press conference, when asked about the state of the industry as Megalopolis struggled to obtain U.S. distribution, Coppola likened a streaming option to a home video release and argued that corporations could replace the studio system, which he felt had "become more a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations because the studios are in great debt." That same day, it secured a limited global IMAX release, including in at least 20 cities in the United States regardless of distributor. On June 17, Lionsgate Films acquired domestic distribution rights, scheduling a release for September 27, 2024. The deal involved Coppola handling marketing costs, estimated to be $15–20 million. Lionsgate previously worked on the home video releases of the director's cuts of Coppola's films, beginning in 2010.

Marketing

In March 2023, comic writer Chris Ryall and artist Jacob Phillips were announced to be producing a graphic novel tie-in to the film. Phillips started drawing the 148-page book in December 2022 and finished in July 2024. Phillips said that he was allowed to use Coppola's screenplay and concept art from the film as source material, but that he had not seen any footage from the film before drawing the comic. Originally announced for a 2024 release by Image Comics and Syzygy Publishing, the graphic novel was later moved to Abrams ComicArts and published on October 7, 2025.

Coppola teased that Colleen McCullough had written a novelization of the Megalopolis story before her death in 2015. In addition, Mike Figgis filmed a making-of documentary, Megadoc, featuring interviews with cast members, Spike Lee, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Coppola's late wife Eleanor Coppola, who died in April 2024 and to whom Megalopolis is dedicated. The documentary premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. Coppola said that the projects were "independent" of him but were based on his "many scripts and ideas over the decades".

On August 16, 2024, Lionsgate announced a partnership with the company Utopia (co-founded by Coppola's nephew, Robert Schwartzman) on the stateside theatrical release, with the latter working on "specialty marketing, word-of-mouth, and non-traditional theatrical distribution initiatives" to target filmgoers. On August 20, Lionsgate shared a theatrical poster that featured Driver's character holding a t-square vertically. Roger Friedman of Showbiz411 felt the tool's resemblance to a lightsaber may have been intentional, given Driver's role as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015–2019).

On August 21, Lionsgate released a trailer that opened with snippets of negative reviews for Coppola's The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula followed by 90 seconds of footage from Megalopolis, all accompanied by Fishburne's narration that "True genius is often misunderstood" and "One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time" before naming the film "an event nothing can prepare you for". The unconventional tactic, according to Rolling Stone's Daniel Kreps, attempted to combat the film's mixed reception at Cannes by pointing out "similarly misguided critical assessments of Coppola's previous masterpieces". Oli Welsh of Polygon was critical of the defensiveness of the trailer, which he thought implied that viewers should ignore critics and see the film for themselves "before it is inevitably reevaluated as a visionary classic", while Mary Kate Carr from The A.V. Club described it as "pretty clever" for incorporating the film's "baffling reputation" into the marketing.

Reception

Box office

Megalopolis grossed $7.6 million in the United States and Canada, and $6.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $14.4 million. Deadline Hollywood calculated the film lost $75.5 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues.

In the United States and Canada, Megalopolis received a wide release alongside The Wild Robot. It was projected to gross $4–8 million from 1,854 theaters, including an estimated 200 IMAX locations, in its opening weekend. Boxoffice Pro identified the film's target audience as cinephiles and said "working against" it were "middling reviews", "a career lull" (Coppola having directed two films in the last 15 years), and "a marketing push marred by controversy", referring to the misconduct allegations against Coppola and the trailer removed over its use of fake quotes. They mentioned that the film's "blockbuster cast" and IMAX release was "no guarantee of audience interest", given Driver's box-office disappointment in "high-concept sci-fi" with 65 the year prior and that the last Coppola–helmed movie to open above $5 million was Supernova (uncredited) in 2000. Megalopolis shared IMAX screens with The Wild Robot before relinquishing them a week later to Joker: Folie à Deux; reserved for The Wild Robot were all showtimes up to primetime, with Megalopolis having evening IMAX showtimes in "key metropolitan locations". Lionsgate, reportedly "not on the hook" for recovering production or marketing expenses after agreeing to distribute the film for a distribution fee and "some percentage points based on box office", was expected to earn $3–5 million regardless of box office performance.

The film made $1.8 million on its first day, including an estimated $770,000 from Monday and Thursday previews. It debuted to $4 million, finishing sixth at the box office. As a result, several publications, including the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, labeled the film a box-office disappointment. IMAX and premium large-format screens accounted for 41% of the gross, with IMAX specifically earning $1.4 million (35%) of the opening. Audiences were 70% men, with 38% over 35 and 32% 25–34-year-olds, while the demographics were 66% Caucasian, 18% Latino and Hispanic, 7% Asian, and 5% Black. The main reasons given in exit polling for seeing the film were Coppola (61%) and Driver (29%), while 32% bought tickets because they heard it was "entertaining and fun" and 9% because they heard it "was good". AMC Lincoln Square was the film's highest-grossing theater with earnings of $84,000 through Saturday. Anthony D'Alessandro of Deadline Hollywood compared the opening to other box-office flops, particularly as being more than the overall gross of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate ($3.5 million in 1980, unadjusted for inflation) but less than Kevin Costner's self-financed Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 ($11 million opening in 2024). It also made less than the fellow new release Devara: Part 1 ($5.6 million), which played in fewer theaters (1,040). Marc Tracy of The New York Times likened it to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's notoriously expensive Cleopatra (1963) and other "ambitious, big-budget spectacle that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public". The New Yorker's Richard Brody urged readers to evaluate the film by its story rather than its revenue, "a determinant of what makes a good investment [but] not a determinant of what makes a good film".

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 46% of 303 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.8/10. The website's consensus reads: "More of a creative manifesto than a cogent narrative feature, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is an overstuffed opus that's equal parts stimulating and slapdash." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 55 out of 100, based on 60 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak were 45% positive (with an average rating of one star out of five).

The early industry screening resulted in divided reactions — while some were mixed, others were primarily of general bewilderment.

It was compared to the literary works of Ayn Rand, particularly The Fountainhead (1943), and the films Metropolis (1927) and Caligula (1979). Before its screening, many journalists expressed fascination regarding its possible reception, labeling it a potential critical and commercial failure, while debating whether it could be Coppola's masterpiece. Others criticized studio executives who anonymously lambasted it. Coppola optimistically likened the polarized responses to the initial reactions to Apocalypse Now and insinuated that "unnamed sources" being referenced did not exist.

The film received a similarly polarized critical response at the Cannes Film Festival. Variety's Matt Donnelly and Ellise Shafer summarized, "Though reactions have been mixed, the film was undoubtedly jam-packed with scenes that ranged from visionary to just plain puzzling". David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised Coppola's hopeful envisioning of the future and "transcendent" narrative progression, calling it a "clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire". Joshua Rothkopf of the Los Angeles Times described it as "an overstuffed, vigorous, seething story about the roots of fascism that only an uncharitable viewer would call a catastrophe" with moments "too divorced from reality", compared its portrayal of a city modeled after New York to Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and complimented the cast for "leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement". The New York Times's Manohla Dargis also noted the "heightened" performances; she disagreed with Coppola's "old-fashioned ideas" about gender roles and technological determinism but commended his artistic ambition, defining Megalopolis as "a fascinating film aswirl with wild visions, lofty ideals, cinematic allusions, literary references, historical footnotes, and self-reflexive asides, all of which Coppola has funneled into a fairly straightforward story about a man with a plan". Vulture's Bilge Ebiri opined that while some scenes were "rushed, undernourished, and underpopulated" and the digital cinematography was "sometimes flat and overly bright, which in turn reduces depth and detail and makes things feel one-dimensional", the film "might be the craziest thing I've ever seen. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy every single batshit second of it".

Home media and roadshow screenings

Megalopolis was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray and DVD by Lionsgate in Europe following its theatrical run, but did not receive a North American physical home media release. The film became available for purchase and rental on premium video-on-demand services, including North America, on November 12, 2024, but was pulled from digital platforms in selected markets in early 2025, reportedly because Coppola prefers that the film only be screened in theaters. The film was made available for streaming on Mubi and Netflix in some European countries in September 2025.

Coppola held six roadshow screenings of Megalopolis in the U.S. from July 20–August 1, 2025. The Atlantic criticized Coppola's decision to limit the film to theatrical screenings and eschew a home video release, writing, "But rather than allow audiences to organically find Megalopolis, Coppola has made it hard to screen legally. Rather than wait for reevaluations of it to emerge over time, Coppola initiated the conversation from his end. His efforts to reintroduce Megalopolis to the public demonstrate the challenge of transforming a flop into a cult classic."