Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Será interesante ver qué sucede a partir de ahora, si es que sucede algo en absoluto.

Por mi parte, me mantengo cauto: habrá que ver si este capricho, este experimento de Coppola, tiene algún impacto real en la demanda y el interés por el film a corto o medio plazo.

Personalmente, aunque me encantaría estar equivocado, no creo que Megalopolis vaya a reestrenarse en cines en el futuro cercano tal y como sostienen algunos insiders. Es demasiado pronto para un film repleto de controversias y con una recepción tan calamitosa. Si creo que es posible que la película se edite pronto en formato físico en Estados Unidos, especialmente si la recepción de Megadoc es buena y las ventas del comic acompañan e incluso que, una vez que la edición en formato físico sea una realidad, se llegue a algún acuerdo jugoso en exclusiva para su exhibición en streaming (tal vez con Apple, por ser la plataforma en streaming que mayor calidad de video ofrece a día de hoy) especialmente si desde Zoetrope acaban confirmado el lanzamiento de un montaje extendido del film.

En fin, divago. Reconozco sin problema, eso si, que Coppola me ha callado la boca: esperaba que los pases de la gira estuviesen repletos de asientos vacios en su inmensa mayoría, como reflejo de la opinion mayoritaria del film. No ha sido así y le ha salido bien la jugada, de modo que debe haber algo que se me escapa o no comprendo.

Veremos.

Megalopolis es una cinta anti-sistema en su concepcion, claramente y puede perfectamente granjearse el status de culto a corto-medio plazo dentro de los sectores cinefagos.

Especialmente, porque es un film que estrictamente no ha calado entre esos criticos que se autodenominan cinefilos (los de manual, eh, los snobistas que dicen ser anti-comercial, pero que luego buscan granjearse likes en las redes sociales) y molesta entre esos grupusculos, como su sentimiento anti-estudio que puede ser mas llamativo que las habituales propuestas que llevan a los Oscars que son mas de check-list que otra cosa. Eso puede serle de mucha ventaja a Coppola.

Iniciado por PrimeCallahan

Megalopolis es una cinta anti-sistema en su concepcion, claramente y puede perfectamente granjearse el status de culto a corto-medio plazo dentro de los sectores cinefagos.

Especialmente, porque es un film que estrictamente no ha calado entre esos criticos que se autodenominan cinefilos (los de manual, eh, los snobistas que dicen ser anti-comercial, pero que luego buscan granjearse likes en las redes sociales) y molesta entre esos grupusculos, como su sentimiento anti-estudio que puede ser mas llamativo que las habituales propuestas que llevan a los Oscars que son mas de check-list que otra cosa. Eso puede serle de mucha ventaja a Coppola.

Gracias por la reflexión, Prime.

Es verdad lo que dices, que puede acabar siendo de culto y contando con un fandom fiel, sobretodo teniendo en cuenta que la propia pelicula es un poco eso, rebelde.

Marty, BruceTimm, ¿vosotros que opinais?

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

Gracias por la reflexión, Prime.

Es verdad lo que dices, que puede acabar siendo de culto y contando con un fandom fiel, sobretodo teniendo en cuenta que la propia pelicula es un poco eso, rebelde.

Precisamente, el grupo que puede salir de los visionados recientes puede ser su mejor baza de cara a un revisionamiento por parte de mucha gente, especialmente en estos tiempos de hacer caso a los tomates u redes sociales varias.

Mi sensación es que esas sesiones atraen más por ser un "tú a tú" con el propio Coppola (el director de El Padrino, al fin y al cabo) que por la película en sí. No me cabe duda de que la película tiene sus defensores, pero no creo que tanto como para poder llenar esas salas sin el aliciente de que Coppola es quien es.

Iniciado por Marty_McFly

Mi sensación es que esas sesiones atraen más por ser un "tú a tú" con el propio Coppola (el director de El Padrino, al fin y al cabo) que por la película en sí. No me cabe duda de que la película tiene sus defensores, pero no creo que tanto como para poder llenar esas salas sin el aliciente de que Coppola es quien es.

Estoy de acuerdo. De ahí que comentase el otro día que no entiendo que ha ganado Coppola organizando todo esto.

A no ser que, como tu me dijiste, lo haya hecho simplemente para darse el gusto, porque puede.

Que oye, si es así, olé sus huevos.

O tal vez también haya querido generar ruido (toda la prensa se ha hecho eco), ya que lo que ha hecho con la pelicula es algo muy poco común.

Ojo Marty, que seamos realistas respecto al futuro de la película y su apreciación popular no quiere decir que este post tuyo haya dejado de ser cierto.

A mí me parece precioso todo el recorrido "vital" de esta película. Esa caída a los infiernos del desprecio y la burla, y esta aparente resurrección por vías inusuales en el mundo de la exhibición. Aunque la película hubiera sido un desastre (que, para mí, no lo es ni de lejos), su existencia es una bendición en un panorama dominado por los putos agregadores de nota podridos, los medios serviles a los grandes estudios, el infantilismo rampante en el debate de cine en redes sociales...

Gracias, Coppola.

PD: Mis hijos dicen que van a sacar un documental, van a sacar un comic... ¿pero el videojuego que?

El río sigue sonando:

I was at the San Francisco event last Friday, and when asked about an eventual Blu-ray, Coppola said he's working in a even crazier cut of the movie that he'll release.

Mmm...

Why one of Hollywood’s greatest directors blew $120m on a film nobody saw


When Francis Ford Coppola set out to reinvent cinema a few years ago, one wonders if he ever realised he’d end up flogging his new version of cinema in person, door to door. But so runs the unexpectedly poignant latest chapter in the tale of Megalopolis, the maestro’s self-funded experimental epic about a futuristic Roman-inspired New York on the brink of societal collapse.

After the film’s high-profile box-office wipe-out last year – it recouped just $14.3m worldwide; barely a tenth of the $120m Coppola personally ploughed into the project – you might imagine the 86-year-old Godfather director would cut his losses, sell the international rights to a streaming platform, and have done with the whole sorry business. Instead, he’s personally schlepping the thing round cinemas in the US for a 10-city tour of one-night-only engagements, with every screening followed by an hour-long seminar led by the director himself.

“This is the way Megalopolis was meant to be seen,” he boomed on his Instagram: “In a large venue, with a crowd and followed by intense interactive discussions about the future.” And at least now, the public seems to agree. Pictures from the New Jersey, New York, Chicago and Texas engagements show seas of heads in vast, sold-out venues.

What’s in store for those who shell out the needful? If the Chicago engagement is anything to go by, “a diverse range of talking points” doesn’t cover it. Topics covered by Coppola’s two-hour post-screening chat – delivered beside an annotated whiteboard – included the nature of time, the introduction of robots into the workforce, the perils of intermarriage (“don’t marry your cousin,” he counselled), his thwarted tap-dancing ambitions, an a cappella vocal performance, and a showcase of Italian profanities.


Describing the above to World of Reel, an audience member characterised the experience as “a whacked-out spiritual odyssey into the mind of a man who either knows everything or has gone completely off the rails. Possibly both.”
At the New Jersey screening, meanwhile, there was good news for devoted Megalopoloids, with Coppola promising to release an even “weirder” cut of the film which reinstates a number of dream sequences Coppola cut before the film’s Cannes premiere.

There’s also the small matter of a graphic novel adaptation (on bookshop shelves for Christmas), plus Mike Figgis’s impending “unfiltered” behind-the-scenes documentary, MegaDoc. It covers the chaotic shoot itself, including the moment Coppola fired his entire visual effects department (allegedly due to their “allegiance to the Marvel Universe mode of filmmaking”), as well as the claims of the director’s flirtatious conduct with female extras on set which were euphemistically described as “old-school behaviour”. (Coppola has denied the allegations and is currently suing the outlet which published them for defamation.)

MegaDoc’s premiere at Venice later this month will likely cement Megalopolis’s notoriety for a good while yet – though it’s hard not to suspect Coppola welcomes the late-life return of his old enfant terrible status.

Megalopolis may have been funded with the proceeds of his Californian vineyards, but this is not the first time the director’s own work has brought him to the brink of run. While making Apocalypse Now, the industry’s skittishness around Vietnam – along with Coppola’s determination to own the finished film himself (as opposed to making it for a studio) – meant its $31.5m budget was hard to scare up: in the end the director had to remortgage his house to get it over the line.

And following the costly failure of his (also self-funded) 1982 musical One from the Heart, he ended up filing for bankruptcy: an urgent need for money in the aftermath of that mid-career disaster was largely why he agreed to go back to Paramount and make The Godfather: Part III.

Like Megalopolis, One from the Heart also split critics – though its unsung-masterpiece status started to build around 15 years ago, and was more or less cemented by the time he released a tighter new cut last year.

So where does this latest drama leave his career? There are two ways to read it. One is to rue that an artist of Coppola’s stature – five Oscars, two Palmes d’Or, a regular fixture on all-time-great lists – has been reduced to a travelling salesman during what might have otherwise been an artistically fruitful late period. (He has another film ready to shoot – a 1930s-set musical inspired by an Edith Wharton novel and the songs of Noël Coward, titled Glimpses of the Moon – but no one will stump up the budget.).

The other, however, is to simply say: good on him. Coppola’s faith in his wild, divisive, career-capping opus remains clearly undimmed, hence his refusal to repackage it as just another piece of content in order to balance the books. While preparing to make Megalopolis years ago, he did toy with including an elaborate interactive press-conference scene, in which voice-recognition and multi-strand playback technology would allow Adam Driver’s master architect, Cesar Catilina, to answer questions from the audience.

This was later scaled back to having ushers at screenings read a single scripted query from the side of the stage – though early audiences were still bamboozled by this uniquely bizarre live fourth-wall-break. On the way out of the 8.30am press screening at Cannes, some bleary attendees assumed the film had been heckled by a member of the festival’s own staff – which even for Cannes would have been a first.

Coppola’s roadshow feels like the logical extension of this determination to put bums in cinema seats only. It tells the world: sorry, but no, this is not one you’re going to catch on your sofas.

Not that Coppola is the first director to lug his own work round the Q&A circuit in lieu of a traditional distribution deal. After the 2011 premiere of his satirical horror film Red State, Kevin Smith announced that he had sold the distribution rights to himself for $20, and toured with the film for five weeks, which recouped a quarter of its $4m budget. (The rest was clawed back in the same time frame via international distribution deals: the cheaper your film, the faster this model pays off.) Indeed, it worked so well for Smith that he spent five months on the road with 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and three each with 2022’s Clerks III and 2024’s The 4:30 Movie.

For fans of natural raconteurs like Coppola and Smith, the prospect of an in-person encounter can be irresistible. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot may have only made $4.7m on its theatrical run, but on a screening-by-screening basis in 2019, only the Best Picture-winning Parasite sold more tickets.


Smith’s fan-pleasing instincts and Coppola’s sheer artistic bloody-mindedness might have placed both directors a few years ahead of the Hollywood curve. The major studios who showed little interest in backing these two mavericks’ work have also started to realise that modern audiences are starting to crave meaningful real-world experiences as the age of the stay-at-home binge-watch nears its end.

Even Netflix itself – architects of the above – now run live versions of their most popular shows, from the (genuinely terrifying) West End stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow to Squid Game: The Experience, where you too can play Grandmother’s Footsteps while being menaced by masked men in hot pink shell suits.

Paramount is currently building a Top Gun Experience in Las Vegas, which will feature a US Navy museum, a themed bar – and, naturally, flight simulators. Or just down the road, you can already pop into Lionsgate’s John Wick Experience, an elaborate multi-part escape room with live performers and a virtual shoot-out.

Meanwhile in Florida, Universal recently opened their new Epic Universe theme park, in which visitors can immerse themselves in the worlds of Harry Potter, Super Mario and How to Train Your Dragon. And the studio is about to break ground just outside Bedford on Universal Studios Great Britain, which will reportedly feature similar IRL (that’s in-real-life) encounters with James Bond, Paddington and The Lord of the Rings.


Either this is a bold new frontier in mass entertainment, or the business is simply re-learning what Walt Disney worked out in the 1950s when he opened a themed amusement park outside of Los Angeles to near-blanket scorn from his studio’s rivals. Coppola might baulk at the comparison – equally, he might not – but there is something of the old-school all-American showman in his latest wheeze too. “Here’s the only way to see this insane thing that everyone’s talking about” is pure PT Barnum. And proper cinema, even the mad stuff – especially the mad stuff – is worth rolling up for.

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

El río sigue sonando:

I was at the San Francisco event last Friday, and when asked about an eventual Blu-ray, Coppola said he's working in a even crazier cut of the movie that he'll release.

Mmm...

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/202...s-ford-coppola

Iniciado por ex-cimpsa

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/202...s-ford-coppola

Exacto. A ver si consigue lanzar este nuevo montaje pronto.