With a budget of $120 million, Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" grossed only $4 million on its opening weekend, making it one of the worst box office openings for a $100M+ movie to date.
Factoring in marketing costs and the theaters taking their cut of the profits, Megalopolis would need to make at least $300 million to break even. I think it's safe to say that's not happening.
It would have been THE worst opening for a $100 million movie ever, had it not been for Pluto Nash's horriffic opening 22 years ago.
I was honestly surprised it was out already. I’ve seen a few memes about it the past few months, but my theater hasn’t even run the trailer. It’s also not even in their coming soon listing, which it should be considering it’s supposedly releasing in december here in the Netherlands.
I doubt they’re bothering to run it at all with the reception this got so far. Not unless it manages to capture a ‘so bad you gotta see this train wreck’ cult status between now and december…
Coppola made like two and half good movies and then he kept going and none of them have been good since. He's kinda like George Lucas, only not as good at merchandising.
Really? I've been hearing about it for months. It was having trouble finding a distributor for theaters, despite the budget and the star power, which was seen as a bad sign. It's being marketed as Francis Ford Coppola's last big budget movie.
Are these Studios just getting ripped off by marketing? I literally never saw an ad for this. The first time I saw a trailer for this film was in an article about how bad it was bombing. Where was all the marketing money going?
yeah but this is a movie, not a product. we usually hear about them from people, not necessarily ads. we might not see many ads but other people we talk to and hear from do, and practically no one in my life and media consumption talks about it. compare that to Barbie.
The trailer made it seem like the kind of pretentiously boring mess that the director seemed to think had some profound message that I tend to really dislike.
Or put more simply, "Looks like the director set $120 million on fire to win Oscars, not make something entertaining."
From what I'm hearing, one of the antagonists is a thinly veiled Rupert Murdoch. Sounds like $120 million to pretentiously explain that Fox News is bad to an audience who figured that out two decades ago.
I really wanted Megalopolis to be good, but I never had high hopes for it. I'll probably still watch it eventually because it has a bunch of actors in it that I love + I'm a sucker for future megacities in movies and games (I'm still not over the fact that they cancelled the Star Wars game that was supposed to take place on the lower levels of Coruscant)
Literally never heard this movie was being made except for 2 posts here, both of which happened after the movie opened in theaters. Marketing team obviously wasn't doing shit.
Considering he had to finance everything himself, there wasn't a ton of marketing and it's a very controversial movie (in the sense that no one wanted to help him with financing/releasing it)
I still don't know if it was overly pretentious garbage or an enlightening allegory of the current state of the world. But watching it was definitely an experience. The cast is great, and I found it visually beautiful and interesting.
I liked it. It was kind of a mess, but it was interesting, thought provoking, and visually very good. As much as there are improvements that could be made or changes to make it more palatable to a wider audience, I’d prefer the weird way it is, and especially movies like this over the next Disney/Corporate Movie Product TM
Even adjusting for inflation, Pluto Nash still wins. It opened to $3.5M in today's money.
I feel like there hasn't been much marketing for Megalopolis. Could be a factor. I'd say the long run time doesn't help, but Oppenheimer counters that point.
Oppenheimer had the advantage of people knowing basically what the story was about. The poster for Megalopolis doesn't really tell me what it's about beyond Adam Driver apparently being an architect.
It's the same reason everything is a reboot or remake: A lot of the marketing cost has already been taken care of with the first movie.
This is the second time I have heard about this film, the last time being the release of the first teaser trailer. Studios love to spend 70 million marketing budgets on broadcast TV advertising and completely missing their target audience. In the case of sci-fi, most of us are more responsive to online marketing campaigns and this film has the online presence of an Amish priest.
Yes, and she was so uncomfortable, nervous and fidgety the whole interview that I'm convinced there's much more dirt on Coppola and his behavior on set that's waiting to surface. She might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said "Please don't ask me anything about the production of this movie so I don't get sued". It was genuinely painful to watch.
Maybe if the trailer didn’t tell you how great and misunderstood Coppola and his works have been and how stupid people were for panning them when they came out, more people would have been compelled to see it. Not that it was pretentious, just arrogant to say hey come watch this this sure fire masterpiece. Also it looks like politics mixed with Inception so maybe too much for people to bother right now? Having said all that I would like to see it, just don’t need to go to the theater for this one.
Having said all that I would like to see it, just don’t need to go to the theater for this one.
From what little I've heard, there's a 4th-wall-breaking scene that involves one of the characters interacting with an audience member (the theater apparently has someone come in and participate). So if nothing else, I guess you could see it in theaters for the novelty?
My theater didn't do that. There was one segment that was framed a bit differently, which I suspect is where the interaction would have been, but it played more like a short press conference and had no interaction.
Edit: It seems I'm wrong! Basically it's up to the cinema to include it, but it doesn't change all that much. I had my information from reading a review by a reviewer who thought he had witnessed something completely unique.
Also, if your paraphrasing is accurate and we’re not playing a game of telephone here, regardless of how past experiences were later treated that’s kinda like saying “you’ll probably hate this unless you’re the kind of person who’ll still only appreciate it once a few critics tell you to in a few years.”
From what I can tell that's part of the reason why it turned out bad. Movies really need to be made within a window of a few years from when the idea starts rolling, if the script hangs around for too long the creators start poking and prodding at it and almost always end up making it worse.
It's bad. If it was good, the story would have been pretty different.
Obviously some people will still like it. But even those will have to admit it's an incredible mess, and it shows why no company wanted to invest in it.
AFAIK, the movie received a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes. It is an art film first and foremost, and probably not for the general audience that flocks to the same old, boring formulaic movies a la Marvel & co.
Not really sad. Coppola is an artist, first and foremost, and he said that he doesn't care whether the film will be financially successful. It is a passion project financed at least partially from his own money, and to be his magnum opus.
I also have zero idea what the movie poster is. It looks like Adam Driver is holding a Pizza Hut logo on a stick in front of the world's most generic mess of golden polygons. I guess that's some sort of construction tool?