The mixed response that Megalopolis has received from critics ahead of its premiere in movie theaters on September 27 doesn't seem to bother Francis Ford Coppola too much. The legendary director has spent multiple decades and hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to make the ambitious Megalopolis, but as of publication, it has a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which classifies it as "Rotten" on the review aggregator site. He describes it as the best reaction he could have received.
During a live-streamed Q&A session before a special screening of Megalopolis for audiences at movie theaters across the country, Coppola talked about his 2024 new movie starring Adam Driver as a brilliant but controversial architect dreaming of creating a new type of city. This included its middling reception thus far. He sees parallels to another one of his iconic movies, Apocalypse Now.
"The funny thing was, Apocalypse was greeted very much… people loved it, people hated it," Coppola said. "People were saying it's the biggest disaster ever made in Hollywood. I said, 'how can it be the biggest disaster, wasn't there some bigger disaster than that?' And the bottom line was that they just kept going back and seeing it again and seeing it again and seeing it again, and they are to this day that movie still. So there are some movies that, especially if there is more to them that you don't totally get it all the first time, that has the longevity just by virtue of you get more out of it the more time you go see it. I'm hoping that'll be the pattern of Megalopolis, because people love it and people hate it. It's the best reaction you could get from a movie."
Indeed, many prominent critics of the time were not fans of Apocalypse Now when it was first released in 1979. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune called it a "murky" and "shaggy" war movie in his less than enthusiastic review; the New York Daily News' Rex Reed described the movie as "a sour, sad muddle;" Frank Rich of Time wrote "Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty."
But the overall reaction definitely leaned positive and the movie was highly regarded by many at the time. This included the Cannes Film Festival, which gave Apocalypse Now its Palme d'Or prize for best of the fest in 1979, and the Oscars, which gave the movie eight nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director for Coppola) and two wins (Best Cinematography and Best Sound). So it's not exactly apples to apples between the two movies, but Coppola's point can be understood: movies can become more appreciated later in their lifetime.
That was the theory behind a trailer released for Megalopolis that featured alleged critics' quotes from Apocalypse Now as well as The Godfather and Dracula that offered negative critiques of those movies. The problem was in multiple cases, particularly for The Godfather, those quotes were incorrectly generated by artificial intelligence; Coppola had nothing to do with that trailer, FYI.
During the event, Coppola also spoke on how he feels that many of his movies have been a little ahead of their time on big issues. He cited The Conversation, which focused on a surveillance professional as the Watergate scandal soon became a major storyline. In Megalopolis he is very open about how he is comparing American society today to the Roman empire amid the current political landscape.
Megalopolis premieres exclusively in movie theaters on Friday, September 27, in the US, UK and elsewhere around the world.
