Although there’s no distributor yet confirmed for Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-development, nearly completed epic Megalopolis, we’re starting to get a sense of when we may see the $100 million epic. The director himself recently indicated it’ll be out in a few months, but according to a new report, a fall release is more likely.
In a round-up of Cannes possibilities, Deadline notes the movie is targeting “a big fall IMAX release,” which means a Venice or North American festival (i.e. TIFF or NYFF) could be more likely than a visit to the Croisette. The article also notes it’s unlikely that Steve McQueen’s Blitz, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Lowery’s Mother Mary, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer will be stopping by Cannes, but George Miller’s Furiosa, Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, among others, are possibilities, while Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness is a wild card.
Starring Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, DB Sweeney, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Bailey Ives, Grace Vanderwaal, James Remar, and Giancarlo Esposito, Coppola called Megalopolis “a love story,” adding, “A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle. One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
For more on Megalopolis (for which scoring is underway, as seen below), and the director’s career in general, we highly recommend giving Sam Wasson’s new book The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story a read.