Francis Ford Coppola has taken audiences deeper into “Megalopolis” with a second trailer for his epic new film, which will debut in U.S. theaters via Lionsgate on September 27.
In the new trailer, which opens with the line, “True genius is often misunderstood,” Coppola takes aim at the critics who have panned his most legendary films over the years. From 1972’s “The Godfather” to “Apocalypse Now,” the trailer cuts through clips of negative film reviews from famous critics.
“A filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” declares a narrator. The new trailer presents Coppola’s latest epic, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to mixed reviews, as a film that will appeal to audiences and age well, proving the critics wrong.
Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight and Jason Schwartzman, “Megalopolis” follows the collapse of a future American empire while referencing the fall of Rome. In the trailer, visionary architect Cesar Catilina (Driver) imagines a futuristic New York City where radical political figures threaten to “destroy eternity.”
“Megalopolis” marks the culmination of a decades-long project for Coppola, who began working on the script for “Megalopolis” in the 1980s. He believed in the film so much that he invested $120 million of his own money into it.
A month after its controversial Cannes premiere, which nonetheless earned it a seven-minute standing ovation, “Megalopolis” has finally found a theatrical partner in Lionsgate, alongside a global commitment from Imax.
Asked about the state of the film industry at Cannes in light of the self-funded “Megapolis,” Coppola said: “I worry that the film industry has become a business of people being hired to meet their debt obligations because the studios are so, so indebted. And the job is not so much to make good movies as to make sure they meet their debt obligations. Obviously, the new companies like Amazon and Apple and Microsoft have a lot of money, so it could be that the studios that we’ve known for so long, some of them wonderful, are not going to be around in the future.”
In his review, Variety Chief film critic Peter Debruge called the film “positively impressive in places and an absolute horror in others.”
“Megalopolis is anything but lazy, and while many of the ideas don’t pan out as planned, it’s the kind of late-career statement fans have been waiting for from this maverick, who never lost faith in cinema,” Debruge wrote of Coppola.
Watch the new trailer for “Megalopolis” below.
