At the ripe old age of 85, Francis Ford Coppola is coming for the haters. The latest trailer for the director’s self-funded science fiction epic Megalopolis starts with an extraordinary denunciation of the critics who have wronged his movies in the past. As an exercise in hubris and decadeslong grudge-holding, it commands respect.
“True genius is often misunderstood,” intones Laurence Fishburne — one of the stars of the movie, doing his best trailer guy voice — before a montage of quotes showing famous critics being mean about some of Coppola’s best-loved movies. “Diminished by its artsiness,” Pauline Kael said of The Godfather. Vincent Canby decried Apocalypse Now as “hollow at the core.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula is “a triumph of style over substance,” according to Roger Ebert. (Ebert actually quite liked it.) These idiots just weren’t forward-looking enough to get what Coppola was doing, clearly. “One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” Fishburne purrs, before describing Megalopolis as “an event nothing can prepare you for.”
The implication — apart from that Coppola is a genius, and critics suck — is that Megalopolis belongs in this lofty canon, and you should ignore the reviews and go see it before it is inevitably reevaluated as a visionary classic. It’s true that the movie, which stars Adam Driver as an architect hoping to restore a crumbling, decadent city after a terrible disaster, reportedly baffled studios and got somewhat mixed reviews after screening at the Cannes Film Festival. But plenty from the critical community have rallied around it, praising Coppola for exactly the devil-may-care audacity that the trailer rather grumpily defends, including such astute and passionate voices as The New Yorker’s Justin Chang and Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri.
Maybe it’s not just sour grapes, though. The trailer’s framing of Coppola as “misunderstood” gets ahead of the inevitable narrative about the movie’s wildly indulgent production (it cost $120 million of Coppola’s own money) versus its modest box office hopes. It also leans into the director’s firebrand reputation and his admittedly patchy filmography, which includes a run of four straight masterpieces in the 1970s — The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now — as well as his fair share of swings-and-misses and costly boondoggles like One From the Heart and The Cotton Club.
Which of these categories will Megalopolis fall into? There’s only one way to find out, says this trailer — and it’s not by reading reviews.
Update: Lionsgate has pulled the trailer from release, after pushback over the fact that all the included quotes were either fabricated or misattributed. According to Variety’s report, a spokesperson issued this statement: “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.” The trailer can still be seen on other YouTube channels.
