Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed new film, Megalopolis, will premiere at Cannes in two days. A teaser trailer dropped this morning, and despite a lot of rumors that this was a nightmare production followed by a baffled reception by potential distributors—the film does not yet have a distribution deal—the teaser looks pretty good!
Granted, teasers and trailers are often misleading. Great movies can have bad trailers, and bad movies frequently have good trailers. But Megalopolis is clearly communicating its key points: it’s a Roman-esque reimagining of America, it stars Adam Driver, there is a fanciful aspect to the film, which is officially subtitled “A Fable”, which further builds audience expectations that this will be a non-literal experience. The image of an exhausted Justitia (the Roman goddess of justice that the American court system uses as its primary symbology) collapsing in an alley is good, the image of the fireballs descending on Manhattan with the Chrysler Building’s eagle-gargoyles in the foreground is REALLY good.
Could the movie be bad? Yes. But also, it could be good. It certainly LOOKS promising at this very early stage. And, as I said last month when unnamed distributors whined about how hard it would be to sell this film from one of American cinema’s most recognizable names, all they had to do was put Adam Driver front and center, slap Coppola’s name on it, and call it a day. And that’s what they did! Megalopolis, despite worry it’s impossible to market, is being sold as a new Coppola film starring Adam Driver, backed up by a stacked cast. That’s a good sell.
Again, we’re just talking about marketing and not the film itself. Audiences won’t see the film for a couple days yet, and even then, festival audiences are not to be trusted. People get swept away in the enthusiasm of the festival experience, but still. Real people who don’t have to worry about selling this film will soon see Megalopolis, and then we can begin gauging if Coppola wasted his winery money or if the bet he made on himself is a winning one. In the meantime, whoever cut this trailer got the main gist of it through clearly—fantasy, Rome, Adam Driver. That’s all they needed to do right now, and they did it.
