©Courtesy of Lionsgate
Finally, the audiences are getting more than just a glimpse of auteur Francis Ford Coppola’s much-anticipated Megalopolis, which features Adam Driver. The film, which also wrote the screenplay, premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The synopsis reads: The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
Besides Driver, the film also stars Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman. Producers on the film are Barry Hirsch, Fred Roos, and Michael Bederman.
“The seeds for Megalopolis were planted when as a kid I saw H.G. Wells’s Things to Come,” Coppola said to Vanity Fair, “This 1930s Korda classic is about building the world of tomorrow, and has always been with me, first as the ‘boy scientist’ I was and later as a filmmaker.”
In his statement to Vanity Fair, the director also addresses rumors about the long gestation of Megalopolis. To maintain total control of the project, he sold part of his winery estate in Northern California to self-finance the $120 million budget.
The film was self-financed by Coppola, as has been widely reported, and it is his first feature since Twixt in 2011. The studio has long been in business with Coppola’s American Zoetrope banner having released the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s previous director’s cuts, i.e. Apocalypse Now Final Cut, The Conversation, The Cotton Club Encore, Tucker: The Man and HisDream, and One From the Heart: Reprise.
Lionsgate Studios will also handle the distribution of Megalopolis across all home entertainment platforms, Megalopolis will hit theaters on Sept. 27.
(Warning) Now, Lionsgate is recalling its latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s epic ‘Megalopolis,’ which featured a litany of fabricated quotes from famous film critics.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety. “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 that was released on Wednesday morning was meant to promote Coppola’s latest film as an art piece that could endure the test of time, similar to his previous classics, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’
©Courtesy of Lionsgate