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The funniest reactions to Francis Ford Coppola’s Mega(flop)olis

The funniest reactions to Francis Ford Coppola’s Mega(flop)olis

There’s so much about it Megalopolis Director Francis Ford Coppola’s confusing and objectively terrible passion project that probably should have stalled the whole thing at some point before it even hit the big screen. From the fact that it was rewritten about 300 times to the bizarre scene where Adam Driver’s character moves his head back and forth while cheekily saying, “So, go back to the club.”

It’s a sentence delivered the way you would if you were 97 years old and trying to talk like teenagers. And, like most of the film, it achieves a level of shock that will literally astound you.

One of the cardinal rules of Hollywood is that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to how many well-known stars are in the cast. And in the case of Megalopolisthere are…many. In addition to Driver, the cast also includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight and Laurence Fishburne, to name a few. What it’s about: Lionsgate is promoting the thing with a straight face as a “Roman epic set in an imaginary modern America.”

Giancarlo Esposito as Mayor Cicero in “Megalopolis.” Image source: Courtesy of Lionsgate

Esposito plays the greedy, unsympathetic mayor of the city of New Rome, which is essentially a replacement for New York. He clashes with an idealistic architect named Cesar (lol), played by Driver, whose kind Robert Moses character has invented a new building material called Megalon, which he plans to use to build his utopian city of the future.

As the film progresses, you’ve barely had time to process this or that bit of oddity before Coppola throws more at you. There are random monologues throughout, bizarre character names (like Plaza’s “Wow Platinum”) and, for starters, breaking the fourth wall. There are times when Driver uses a sort of Foghorn-Leghorn accent. Long story short: Megalopolis To me it feels like the kind of film you would make if you smoked a lot of weed before deciding how to spend your film budget.

Accordingly, this $136 million disaster grossed an embarrassingly small $4 million on its opening weekend – failing to connect with an epic Argylle And Madam Web for a year in which there were spectacular box office failures.

Of course the Internet has thoughts. “I laughed a lot in Megalopolis, I admit that sometimes on purpose,” one viewer told X. “But I have to say, ‘If the baby is a girl, we’ll name her Sunny Hope.’ and if it’s a boy, Francis should be nominated for Howler of the Decade.”

To be honest, Megalopolis defies rational categorization – and indeed any attempt to normalize it – because the final product is a mess of sporadic beauty mixed with insanely bad writing and technical decisions. “#Megalopolis is a HUGE example of an over-the-top thought with no direction,” another user said in response to some truly beautiful scenes that show what Coppola wants to express.”

Accordingly The GuardianCoppola switched to more traditional green-screen films at some point during the process, with the newspaper quoting a source who said: “His dig at us was always, ‘I don’t want to do a Marvel movie,’ but in the end…” That day After all, that’s exactly what he shot.” No wonder, the film currently has an audience rating of 34% and a critic rating of 49% on the Tomato site.

There’s not much else to say except Megalopolis is an objectively bad film. It’s a shame that the director of The Godfather And Apocalypse now had no one around to stop him from turning his last film into such an unfinished mess that theaters are almost sold out.