Dear Gossips,
The lineup for the 2024 Cannes Film Festival was announced yesterday. It includes new films from Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, Sean Baker, Ali Abbasi, Andrea Arnold, Jacques Audiard, Yorgos Lanthimos, Paolo Sorrentino, David Cronenberg, Leos Carax, and Coralie Fargeat. The out of competition premieres include Furiosa and Kevin Costner’s Horizons, An American Saga.
It’s a helluva lineup, but a lot of early ink is being spilled for Coppola’s Megalopolis, with a recent report quoting anonymous studio flaks saying things like “there’s no way to position this movie” and that a screening for distributors ended with a “conspicuous silence”.
Megalopolis has been hip deep in dire warnings since it started filming in 2022. Coppola self-financed it, at one point he fired the VFX team, and key department heads were either fired or quit. I covered all that mess here. Now, he can’t find a distributor yet is premiering the film in competition at Cannes. I am rooting for this SO HARD. Or, I’m rooting for Coppola and Megalopolis as hard as I can for a movie involving Shia LaBeouf.
I just don’t like how everyone is talking about this film before anyone (outside of distributors) has seen it. Yes, Coppola has a rocky history, he’s made some all-time classics, but he’s also made some all-time cautionary tales. True, he hasn’t had a hit film since Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 (it was a critical flop but commercially successful). But wouldn’t it be great for him to hit a late career home run? Shouldn’t we be rooting for anyone to have any kind of success in cinema during these rather dire days of Big IP and floundering comic book movies?
And there’s a pretty big f-cking gap between potential distributors being flummoxed about how they’ll market a film and how an audience might enjoy it. Also, what kind of weak ass sauce is “there’s no way to position this movie”? It stars Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito as rivals in a post-apocalyptic pseudo-Roman empire. Cut a trailer with a lot of intense stares and ominous music and put “FROM FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA AND STARRING ADAM DRIVER” in big letters and call it a day. This isn’t rocket science, you don’t have to save the world, you have to get people interested in seeing a new Adam Driver movie from one of the most recognizable names in American cinema, and half the world is already weirdly horny for Adam Driver.
Anyway, let’s reconvene after Megalopolis premieres at Cannes and critics and an actual audience have seen it. At least then we can weigh the opinions of people who aren’t solely worried about how to sell the movie. Also, let’s start a witch circle for Aubrey Plaza attending Cannes. She co-stars in Megalopolis and I am DYING to see what she’d bring to the Croisette.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
