Megalopolis Is Getting A Director’s Cut That Will Make It Even “Weirder”
“It was [originally] more weird.”
When Megalopolis was released in 2024, it’s fair to say its reception was divisive. Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project was a self-indulgent fever dream, less movie than art installation filled with images never seen on the big screen before, and also multiple scenes of Jon Voight sleepily talking about his cock. Some loved it, most hated it, and the film fizzled at the box office, earning just $7 million (and several Razzie Awards). The one thing everyone could agree on was that it was pretty weird, but Coppola recently revealed that it could have been even weirder.
“It was [originally] more weird,” Coppola said while showing Megalopolis in New Jersey as part of a nationwide tour of the film, per World of Reel. Coppola, who received the film’s rights back after Lionsgate pulled it from theaters following its meager box office showing, has been taking Megalopolis across the country in a sort of roadshow tour with LiveNation called “An Evening With Francis Ford Coppola and Megalopolis.” The tour will hit six different cities and include an interactive discussion with the director on the theme of “How to Change Our Future.” And while in New Jersey, Coppola announced that he was already planning a recut.
“I own the picture, I can do anything I want with it,” Coppola said. The recut will include deleted dream sequences that Coppola cut “because already people were saying this film was so weird.”
Every single line reading from Aubrey Plaza was perfectly strange.
The theatrical release is already pretty strange. Voight boner scenes aside, the film features Adam Driver’s lead character Cesar Catilina engaging in a sort of metaphysical modern dance, while at another point, the movie breaks the fourth wall to have Cesar answer a question read by an actor or audience member in the theater. And that’s just a handful of the strange happenings in Megalopolis, a movie where Cesar has the power to stop time, and doesn’t really do anything with it. Needless to say, “weirder” feels like a guarantee.
Going forward, this “weirder” recut might be the only version audiences can see. Megalopolis has not been made available to stream, rent, or buy, making the tour the first time the film is again available to the public. “This is the way ‘Megalopolis’ was meant to be seen, in a large venue, with a crowd and followed by intense interactive discussions about the future,” Coppola said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
That’s not the only way Coppola is keeping the dream of Megalopolis alive. He’s also turning it into a graphic novel, which will act as a sort of semi-sequel (or, in Coppola’s words, a “sibling of the film”), slated for an October 2025 release. And the making of the film was captured in the upcoming Mike Figgis documentary Megadoc, which will debut at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Cesar may not have stopped time much, but Coppola is doing his darnedest to make sure Megalopolis isn’t lost to it.
