Director Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Megalopolis has always been a difficult sell. It is a self-funded utopian film that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film received mixed reviews and struggled to find distribution in the United States.
When it finally found distribution, many people believed that mainstream audiences would find it too strange for a fun night out.
This weekend, those worries became real as the film opened in around 1,800 locations in the U.S., thanks to Lionsgate. It is not only doing poorly at the box office but also getting a very low D+ CinemaScore from viewers.
In some circles, this low score might be seen as a badge of honor. It could invite curious people to see the film and experience its strangeness. However, curiosity is not enough to bring in audiences right now. Megalopolis made only about $2 million on its opening day.
Half of this amount came from preview screenings held on Wednesday and Thursday. It is expected to earn less than $5 million this weekend. This result is disappointing, especially since the film cost about $120 million to make.
Coppola raised the money for the film himself, partly by selling a share of his wine business. Megalopolis has been a passion project for him.
He became famous in the 1970s during the New Hollywood wave. Coppola is best known for directing classic films like The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation.
His last movie was Twixt, released in 2011. Megalopolis stars Adam Driver and features a diverse cast. It is set in a made-up modern United States and follows a conflict between an idealistic architect and a corrupt politician.
The movie’s D+ CinemaScore is the same as the recent video game adaptation Borderlands. That film also performed poorly, earning about $32 million worldwide against a budget of over $100 million.
Other films that received similar CinemaScores include Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Ari Aster’s Hereditary. This shows that Megalopolis is in the company of other impressive films made by talented filmmakers.
Currently, Megalopolis has a “rotten” 49% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience rating is similarly low at 41%. In his review, Chase Hutchinson compared the film to “a Rorschach test where everything is a stretch and nothing has any substance to it.”
The film also stars Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire, Dustin Hoffman, D.B. Sweeney, and Giancarlo Esposito.
