With ‘Megalopolis,’ the flop era returns to cinemas

Just before previews began at a lower Manhattan theater on a recent Saturday night, Tazer Army reflected on the Francis Ford Coppola movie “Megalopolis” before even seeing it.

“There’s just so much lore,” Army said.

She wasn’t wrong. The lore dates back more than 40 years, to when Coppola, the director of the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, conceived the project. Now 85, he finally made this long-gestating project a reality by selling part of his wine business to finance the film, which cost roughly $140 million to make and market. There were allegations of on-set misconduct, and a suit by Coppola over the accusations. There was even a trailer with made-up quotations from famous movie critics.

And the biggest piece of lore: the fact that Megalopolis, as its title does not bother to deny, is a grandiosely personal vision that seemed fated to lose a lot of money at the box office — something its dismal opening weekend haul of $4 million confirmed.

The upshot is that Megalopolis is a film both about a tortured-genius artist (architect Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver) overcoming obstacles to realise his solitary vision and the product of one. It appears destined to be remembered as the latest instance of a Hollywood archetype that is every bit as key to the industry’s mythology as its biggest hits: the auteurist flop.

“It seems you either have the epic, beautiful win of a film that is beloved, or the one that is wrapped up in ego and is scandalous,” said Maya Montañez Smukler, the head of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center. “It’s the perverse pleasure in seeing somebody fail on such an enormous magnitude.”

Even at the peak of Hollywood’s studio era, there were flops — ambitious, big-budget spectacles that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, brought 20th Century Fox near bankruptcy and failed to recoup its $44 million budget, then a record.

But it took the elevation in the 1970s of a brash class of filmmakers with names like Scorsese, Lucas and Coppola to usher in the flop’s modern era.

The auteurist flop is different from the box office bombs that litter theaters every year. These flops are not things designed by committee to haul in cash that often fall short. “Madame Web,” for instance, the Spider-Man spinoff from earlier this year that its own star appeared to disown, was many things, but auteurist it was not.

Instead, these are opuses in which a brilliant filmmaker really goes for it but flies too close to the sun. Often they have their defenders, who insist that audiences were beneath appreciating them. Film aficionados can name some offhand: Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love” (1975). Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” (1980). Elaine May’s “Ishtar” (1987). Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld” (1995). Perhaps, even, Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter One” (2024).

“A lot of these filmmakers are coming out of film school, they’re very arrogant, they don’t work their way up the ladder as the previous generation did,” said Smukler, who wrote “Liberating Hollywood,” a study of female directors in 1970s Hollywood.

“That rise and fall,” she added, “is a juicy narrative.”

Film may be uniquely susceptible to flop discourse, because box office receipts for theatrical releases are widely available and pored over like baseball statistics.

Yet the ways in which “Megalopolis” differs from typical auteurist flops may be as revealing as the ways in which it lines up with them, said Mark Harris, a film historian.

Harris compared “Megalopolis” with “Heaven’s Gate,” which was greatly anticipated as Cimino’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning 1978 Vietnam War movie, “The Deer Hunter.” Both the budget and length of “Heaven’s Gate” ballooned (its run time, 3 hours and 39 minutes, was actually a compromise with the studio), and its critical reception was harsh.

“‘Heaven’s Gate’ was the next movie by the young wunderkind,” Harris said. “The narrative that got written almost before the movie was seen by anyone was, ‘Is he too big for his britches?’”

By contrast, Harris continued, “Coppola is obviously not a young gun — he is this quite old and very revered titan of American movies.” His reputation, Harris added, “no matter what the fate of ‘Megalopolis’ is, is completely secure.”

For some observers, the unavoidable flop discussion is a baleful byproduct of American movie fandom, a symptom of the country’s Puritanical obsession with morality and public failure.

“A filmmaker who takes investment in a film and makes a film that is extremely gratifying and consistent with the filmmaker’s personal vision but doesn’t make back its money is taken as a violation of the moral contract — not legal or professional, but moral,” said Richard Brody, a film critic for The New Yorker.

Brody, who recently published a rave review of “Megalopolis” (as did The New York Times), urged observers to untether their judgments of a film’s worthiness from its box-office success.

“There are filmmakers whose personal vision seems to mesh extremely well with the public’s,” Brody said. “I don’t think Steven Spielberg or James Cameron are doing anything other than what they see fit. They’re fulfilling their personal vision, which for whatever reason happens to reach wide audiences.

“That is a determinant of what makes a good investment,” Brody added. “It is not a determinant of what makes a good film.”