🎬 Megaflopolis, Part One

What creative risks are worth taking? What consequences are you willing to live with if you fail? What is failure, by your definition? Is failing better than not trying?

“Failure loosens the mind. Perfection stills the heart.”
—Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

Have you seen Francis Ford Coppola’s utterly delulu cinema cringefest, Megalopolis? It’s a “Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America,” with the power players of New Rome fighting over the future of humanity.

I can presume, with near certainty, no.

Following forty years of percolating, Coppola’s film finally saw the movie theater light of day after premiering last Friday.

Like Kevin Costner with Horizon, Coppola took a huge swing on independently producing Megalopolis, “selling part of his wine business to raise the necessary funds — about $120 million in production costs and another $20 million or so in marketing and distribution expenses,” according to Brooks Barnes at The New York Times.

Barnes didn’t miss words reporting the opening box office results:

“There is no kind way to put it: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis died on arrival over the weekend.”

Despite all that Coppola invested—time, money, reputation, an A-list cast—“moviegoers rejected the film: Ticket sales from Thursday night through Sunday total[ed] roughly $4 million in North America, slightly below worst-case scenario prerelease projections.”

Oof.

All that effort and we, the people, couldn’t even be bothered to show up?! Within seconds of reading the article, I knew I had to see it for myself. My husband Michael, a fine artist with a proper MFA, likes avant-garde movies after all, and I’m trying to learn how to appreciate them instead of devolving into frustrated rage when they end.

As a self-declared flopologist now, I’m not just trying to revel in other people’s failure. In my earlier post about Costner’s flop(era)-or-not, I proposed a twist on the more mean-spirited schadenfreude. With ChatGPT’s help, I offer a new German word:

Mitgefühlserleichterungsfreude: Mitgefühl (empathy or compassion) + Erleichterung (relief) + Freude (joy).

So, mitgefühlserleichterungsfreude = the joy or relief one feels from empathizing with another person’s struggles, and thereby feeling less alone in one’s own challenges.

I booked our $50 (!) IMAX tickets for a noon showing on Thursday, because given the abysmal opening weekend results, I was afraid I wouldn’t catch it in theaters after that, and our home TV wouldn’t suffice. Coppola shot it on IMAX for a reason. This is his creative vision! Forty years in the making!¹

“A rich tapestry of chaos.”
—Pop Culture Happy Hour

Dohnuts, it was awful.

My aim here is about more than a movie review (that’s above my pay grade), so we’ll get to whatever strange takeaways can be mined from this experience in part three of this post.

But first, I feel compelled to share a few high-level notes, because I really wanted to like it. I wanted Coppola’s big creative risk to work out! I wanted moviegoers to be wrong, figuring they’re just unsophisticated Marvel-loving teens who don’t get his vision as an ARTÍSTE! But alas, I can say no such thing.

Take or leave my zero-point-five cents, but in my humble normie opinion:

• There was no plot, character development, or chemistry between any of the actors, despite their star status.

• The script was full of schlocky clichés, a failed attempt at profundity.

• It was so male-gaze-forward that I felt like we regressed to the fifties: the men of this movie were important (mayors! architects! bank magnates!) while the women were sexed-up pretty young things, there to writhe around looking beautiful while validating their men.

• It’s a form of narcissistic autofiction, filmic therapy for Coppola, who seems to be working out his fears of aging, losing relevance, and his august virility on the screen. But wait! A baby is born, and he (of course, a he!) is our future. What is his name? Take a guess.²

• The movie overall was disjointed and joyless, except for peals of laughter erupting randomly from audience-goers in disbelief at what was unfolding. Are you seeing this?! Are you kidding me?! We wanted to say to the strangers next to us.

• Michael’s take: “It lacked depth, it was bloated, it wasn’t well edited, it had no balance, special effects were everywhere, there was no consistency, there was no story, it was boring, it was lazy. It literally wasn’t a movie, apart from the fact that it was projected in a movie theater and had actors play their parts, and the parts are even questionable . . .”

• Ironically, the movie was obsessed with time: pausing it, grasping it, chasing it, craving it, fixing it. All we wanted after it ended was ours back.

The kindest one neighbor could offer: “Hey, he tried lots of new ideas!” As we staggered out of the theater, Michael mumbled, “Well, he got us all saying his name for a few weeks.” And I couldn’t help but think: This is what happens when you are too rich and you self-fund your own creative project, like J. Lo—there’s no one to tell you no.

If this movie is such a flop, what can we learn? Why discuss it here at all?

Because Doh is about our relationship to risk: What creative risks are worth taking? What consequences are you willing to live with if you fail? What is failure, by your definition? Is failing better than not trying?

In Kevin Costner’s People cover story in June, he made it clear that although he seeks commercial and critical success, there is something bigger driving him: “As he finally brings to the screen the sweeping story he’s kicked around for more than 30 years, Costner has no regrets. ‘The gamble is ignoring my heart and ignoring it whispering to me,’ he said.”

Coppola shared similar sentiments about his oeuvre in interviews leading up to the Megalopolis release, saying, “My first goal is always to make a film with all my heart.”

I’ve talked about chasing the taste of creative freedom; for certain incorrigible creatives, we can’t live without that oxygen-like feeling of following our heart’s siren song, those swing-big, if-you-don’t-bet-on-yourself-who-will delulu dreams.

But if they don’t work out and we risk too much, we have to be prepared for the consequences. Sometimes “just being yourself” or following your heart isn’t enough, especially if you don’t execute the project well, or it’s not what the market wants, or—I hate to say it—your whole vibe is no longer what the market wants.

Does that mean you should stop taking risks? No, I don’t think so.

Coppola will lick his reputational and financial wounds, but I bet he won’t regret making this film. Maybe he thinks we’re the ones with the problem, plebes too dim to see his genius.

I love how the podcasters at Pop Culture Happy Hour put it:

“The most recent box office hit that Francis Ford Coppola directed was The Rainmaker. It’s a perfectly competent John Grisham adaptation, but who cares? Who cares? Four hundred people could have made that movie; only one could have given us this.”

Halfway through Megalopolis, Adam Driver as Cesar repeats a single line several times, one that stuck out to me then and now as the coda for this entire project:

“When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”

That’s what Coppola did here, across a span of forty years. He leapt.

So what if critically and financially he landed in a belly flop? So what if, from our seats in the peanut gallery, the results seem humiliating?

It was in the leap that he was free.³

❤️

1. 🍿 Re: the rush to see the overpriced IMAX matinee—It felt important to see the movie as FFC intended it, supersized (big swinging movie d**k!), on the big big screen with the big big sound and an obscenely large bucket of refillable popcorn that turns into exhausting dirty fuel the next day but is the pinnacle of in-the-moment movie-going pleasure. My mom never let me add butter growing up, so now I press the dispenser button with glee as I watch it drench the kernels. But I digress…

2. Francis. 🙄

3. If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

Is Kevin Costner in His Flop Era?

🙃 Are You in Your Flop Era?

🃏 Decorating My House of Cards

🤸🏻‍♀️ Delulu is the Solulu, Part One

💬 Is "Just Be Yourself" Good Career Advice?

Chasing the Taste of Creative Freedom