Francis Ford Coppola is planning a fall 2022 shoot for his upcoming epic ‘Megalopolis’, with a budget of $100-$120 million. Oscar Isaac, Cate Blanchett, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and Zendaya have all been in talks for main leads in the film.
Emboldened by the recent sale of a portion of his considerable vineyard holdings in Sonoma County to Delicato Family Wines, Coppola has fortified his resources to borrow against, and is ready to gamble once again on his vision to make a movie he feels can be a North Star for a younger audience, and society in general, searching for optimism in a moment where global warming is taking its toll, and polarizing politics and digital misinformation are so pronounced that half the country is resisting Covid vaccines that scientists honed in a remarkably short time to combat a global pandemic.
Coppola has not been bashful about his take on the current superhero movie trend. “When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”
He describes Megalopolis, saying “The concept of the film is a Roman epic, in the traditional Cecile B. DeMille or Ben-Hur way, but told as a modern counterpart focusing on America,” he said. “It’s based on ‘The Catiline Conspiracy,’ which comes to us from ancient Rome. This was a famous duel between a patrician, Catiline, and that part will be played by Oscar Isaac, and the famous Cicero, who will be Forest Whitaker. He is now the beleaguered mayor of New York, during a financial crisis, close to the one that Mayor Dinkins had. This story takes place in a new Rome, a Roman epic set in modern times. The time set is not a specific year in modern New York, it’s an impression of modern New York, which I call New Rome.”
Either it’ll be a legend or it’ll destroy the creator. The end product