Will ‘Megalopolis’ be the last American film?

Francis Coppola’s extraordinary new picture asks the essential question of whether American cinema can survive the people who make it.

In 1968, New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt wrote: “I think Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor.” At the time, Gilliatt was a voice in the wilderness. The critics had mostly condemned the just-premiered 2001 as at best a boring slog. Many in the film industry considered it a disaster. As he watched the audience walkouts, an MGM executive reportedly said, “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.”

The executive, of course, was hilariously wrong. Gilliatt alone got it right. 2001 was embraced by young audiences and proved a massive hit. Filmmakers the world over were stunned and inspired by it. “You made me dream, eyes wide open,” Federico Fellini wrote to Kubrick. Within a decade, even the most portentous critics declared it one of the greatest films ever made. Kubrick went on to perhaps the most illustrious career in filmmaking history. 

In her prescient and lonely review, Gilliatt wrote of Kubrick and 2001: “Technically and imaginatively, what he put into it is staggering: five years of his life; his novel and screenplay, with Arthur C. Clarke; his production, his direction, his special effects; his humor and stamina and particular disquiet.” Of the film, she called it “a uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi, made by a man who truly possesses the drives of both science and fiction.” 

The same, almost word for word, could be said of Francis Ford Coppola’s recently released Megalopolis. Indeed, the kinship is so remarkable as to beggar coincidence. Coppola also invested many years of his life and, it seems, almost everything he has into it—including enormous amounts of his own money. It has humor, stamina, and particular disquiet. It is a “uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi.” It is, in fact, uniquely poetic in almost every way. I have never seen another film quite like it.

I say this because I think that Megalopolis is some sort of great film, and certainly an unforgettable endeavor. At least a few other people think so as well, mainly other filmmakers like Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh, who have taken up the cudgel for the picture in the face of near-universal ambivalence and/or disdain. The critics have been either perplexed by or violently hostile to the film, with many referring to it as one of the worst films ever made. Audiences have stayed away. Like many, I had the unfortunate (for Coppola) but in some ways welcome (to me) experience of seeing it shown to an otherwise empty house. In Hollywood itself, Coppola and the film have become a punchline, with the wags referring to it as Megaflopolis.

In some ways, these reactions ought to be expected. Schadenfreude is par for the course when a film by a legendary director like Coppola fails at the box office. Something much like it followed his 1982 disaster One From the Heart, which bankrupted him for decades. Moreover, Megalopolis is the type of film that, at least initially, is destined to be either polarizing or outright hated. 

This is somewhat proved by the fact that I am totally unable here to give a comprehensive summary of its plot. It would take pages to do so. Suffice it to say, the premise is that a genius city planner is driven by his own genius to construct a utopian city in the midst of the capital of a modern Roman Empire. He is opposed by political, economic, and social forces of all kinds. He mightily struggles against them alongside the woman he loves and who loves him. Beyond that, it can only be said that the film contains a strong streak of magical realism, with the planner being capable of stopping time itself whenever the mood strikes him. 

The film is, throughout, a collage of stunningly baroque images, edited together in an expressionistic rather than narrative style. Shots and scenes often spin around each other in associative rather than logical connection. This alone is more than enough to outrage all those who loathe cinematic pretension. And the film is, in a sense, quite pretentious. It is enormously ambitious and clearly seeks to convey what Coppola believes to be a profound message about the nature and fate of humanity. That message is not entirely comprehensible beyond a basic admonition to embrace the future and believe in the possibility of positive change. This is not, perhaps, nearly as profound as Coppola might think it is. But it is certainly less banal than the message of a terrible film like Contact, which both critics and audiences inexplicably adored.

But Coppola, though he may at times believe otherwise, has never been a philosopher. In his great films, he has displayed every quality not of the philosopher but the supreme dramatist. A dramatist who can take the largest themes, like power and corruption (The Godfather), the descent of a paranoid age (The Conversation), and the violence of man’s shadow self (Apocalypse Now) and transform them into effortlessly compelling and surprisingly original work. He is not the equal of Orson Welles or Kubrick, but like them, he hunts very big game indeed.

Megalopolis, in many ways, hunts the biggest game: namely, the future of humanity. It does not succeed in catching it, but the attempt is most certainly compelling and original. As a result, the film is above all interesting. More interesting, in fact, than anyone is willing to give it credit for. In this, it towers above almost anything American cinema has produced in recent years; certainly over anything that has achieved wide theatrical release.

For the most part, the best films of the past decade have been released on streaming services. Some of them, like Welles’s miraculously retrieved The Other Side of the Wind, were not even made in the 21st century. Others, like Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary The Irishman, were impossible to make in any other form due to the current impossible state of Hollywood. Almost none of them have been released on the big screen in anything other than very limited runs in select cities, usually for the purposes of Oscar qualification.

This simple fact points to the immense and perhaps tragic importance of Megalopolis. This importance is, in some ways, irrelevant to the film itself or its individual fate. Regarding the latter, I think posterity will be kind. Like Heaven’s Gate, another viciously derided picture, it may take a few decades for Megalopolis to “find its audience,” but it almost certainly will—even if it is only a small but dedicated cult of admirers. Certainly, a few idiots like Michael Medved will list it as one of the “worst films ever made” and “Megaflopolis” will be a buzzword for a time. But it is likely that, as they did after 2001, a great many critics official and unofficial will be forced to eat the proverbial crow.

More importantly, Megalopolis represents, in some ways, a crossroads in American cinema. In its audacity, both in content and production history, Megalopolis asks an ominous question: Can American cinema survive itself? The answer is unclear, but if the reaction to Megalopolis is any indication, the signs are not good. 

II.

It is generally agreed that American cinema is in a bad way; in fact, a very bad way. There is a good reason for this: Most movies made by Hollywood are bad and independent films are not much better. Hollywood appears to have largely given up even trying to make good films. Faced with ferocious competition from all manner of new media, it has retreated into churning out ruinously expensive and essentially interchangeable pieces of CGI spectacle. The Marvel films, for example, are all but indistinguishable from each other. Yet they have come to define the spirit of the industry.

As a result, Hollywood makes essentially nothing but Marvel movies or clones of Marvel movies. The Disney model of refusing to produce anything that is not based on an existing IP, greenlighting cookie-cutter scripts that crush any hint of idiosyncrasy, constructing films out of nothing but a series of setpieces barely strung together, and burying any semblance of comprehensibility under mountains of CGI has conquered the studios completely. 

The problem is that certain films simply cannot be made without an enormous outlay of capital. Only the major Hollywood studios possess such capital. Thus, any film made on a significant scale has got to have studio backing. If the studios will not back such a film, it simply cannot exist. This significantly reduces the scale on which anything original or daring can be made. In the end, it renders entire genres off limits to filmmakers deemed challenging or idiosyncratic. An expensive sci-fi film like 2001, for example, could simply never be made today. No major studio would back it in a million years.

As a result, any film that attempts something more than a CGI extravaganza must be small and inherently limited in scope. Smaller films can be financed by independent means or by streaming services with more limited resources. This would seem to leave at least some room for an American cinema of quality. Sadly, due to nepotism, insularity, and narcissism, American “art films” are almost as unbearable as American blockbusters. When I saw Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, I wanted to scream at the screen: “I don’t care about your divorce!” However, unlike Baumbach’s execrable follow-up White Noise, it was at least watchable.

The poverty of American art films is an issue for another time. But the overall result of economic realities cannot be denied. The case of Martin Scorsese is paradigmatic. Scorsese has stated explicitly that he will never work for the studios again; not out of ideological conviction but simple necessity. They do not want to make the films he wants to make and likely never will. This has sent him to the streaming services, which have, with some generosity, granted him budgets large enough to make films on a sufficient scale to satisfy him. It is unlikely that a less legendary director would ever enjoy such largesse.

This means that America’s best and certainly most acclaimed filmmaker, the man who made Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas—all considered by consensus to be among the greatest films ever made—has returned to where he was a half-century ago, before his series of masterpieces: He can’t get arrested in Hollywood. Scorsese, at least, has told the truth: He declared, publicly and to much controversy, that Marvel movies are “not cinema.” He was, of course, absolutely right, in the sense that they lack even the semblance of the cinematic experience, which is the creation of transcendent comedy or drama. As Scorsese put it, Hollywood now makes rollercoaster rides, not movies.

The powers-that-be in Hollywood are now dedicated to making “not cinema.” That is, a kind of non-cinema; a cinema of absolute emptiness—a nihilistic void. Thus the studios’ dominant genre: the comic book movie. There is nothing inherently wrong with any genre, of course. The original 1978 Superman is a wonderful film, because at the time it was fresh, unique, and even moving. It has a certain magic in its celebration of a particularly American understanding of heroism and goodness. The genre has also produced occasional brilliance like Zack Snyder’s very underrated adaptation of Watchmen. 

In general, however, comic book films are non-cinema. The first Iron Man had its charms, Infinity War was surprisingly complex for what it was, and Batman Begins at least managed to strike the difficult balance between fantasy and the believable. But for the most part, even the most acclaimed comic book films have been empty vessels. The Dark Knight may be the most overrated film since Apocalypse Now, while The Dark Knight Rises was so horrendous it might as well have been directed by Ed Wood. Guardians of the Galaxy may be the stupidest film ever produced by a major studio, while Man of Steel starts out well but becomes nothing but a single endless action scene of headache-inducing volume. The only sane reaction to it was boredom. As for the truncated Batman v. Superman, Joss Whedon’s reshot Justice League, and others, the less said the better.

In the face of Scorsese’s criticism, which is likely shared by many more filmmakers than are willing to endanger their careers by admitting it, the kings of Hollywood have their perennial excuse: They are simply giving the people what they want. This is the classic populist argument that people like stupid films—they like non-cinema—and therefore Hollywood makes them. Any argument against this is simple snobbery, the moaning of a rarified upper class that lives in a bubble of affluence and pretension with no understanding of economic realities. To steal a line from Mencken, Hollywood intends to give the people what they want good and hard.

This is a persuasive argument in a fundamentally populist and capitalist society like the United States. But it is quite fallacious because if the history of the movies—and Hollywood itself—proves anything, it is that the people don’t know what they want until they want it. One can focus-group public sentiment into the ground and the moviegoer will still surprise you. Moreover, the money argument has been conclusively disproven by the money itself. That is, a very large number of ruinously expensive non-cinema blockbusters have failed spectacularly. This has been the case throughout Hollywood history, but the industry perennially ignores it. It did so even in the wake of, for example, the titanic disaster of 2013’s The Lone Ranger, which demonstrated for all time that blockbusters made precisely to formula are no more likely to gush cash than an art film. Blowing up everything in sight via computer graphics may give the audience a guaranteed if momentary orgasmic thrill, but it is no insurance policy. Yet Hollywood’s Pavlovian dementia continues.

Indeed, Hollywood often seems hellbent and determined never to learn its lesson. This was most recently demonstrated by the massive success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Nolan himself pointed out that he had made a three-hour film about a relatively obscure historical figure that mostly involved very long scenes of people talking to each other. Yet it managed to make almost a billion dollars. In other words, precisely the kind of film Hollywood constantly assures itself will be a certain disaster was an enormous hit. This is proof enough that Hollywood’s powers-that-be have no idea what they’re talking about.

This is only reinforced by Nolan’s very existence. Interstellar and Inception were also major hits despite being difficult and challenging material that lacked any existing IP to buttress them. Dunkirk was not just a success but a genuinely great film, as is the first two-thirds of Oppenheimer. Yet the studio’s reaction to these obvious facts has been: “Make more Avengers, make more Star Wars, make more Transformers, exterminate all the brutes.” One can imagine their endless excuses: “Nolan is a one-off. No one else can do what Nolan does. The audience can’t possibly actually like his movies. They can’t not have been bored by three hours of Oppenheimer. His next one will fail, just you wait. Make more Marvel.”

Ironically, Coppola himself played a very tangential role in creating this cinema of emptiness. To an enormous extent, the steady erosion of American cinema can be laid at the feet of 1977’s Star Wars. It simply made far too much money for Hollywood to ever return to the period of fertility that marked the years between 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and Star Wars’ conquest of the popular culture. Coppola, of course, was a major part of this brief renaissance through the two Godfather films, but he was also mentor to and enabler of Star Wars director George Lucas. Lucas is, in many ways, paradigmatic. He began his career as a cutting-edge artist with THX 1138 and has now ended it as an artistically bankrupt billionaire and major Disney stockholder. 

Lucas’s pre-Star Wars efforts, THX and the far superior American Graffiti—a lamentation on lost youth masquerading as a teen comedy—were both in keeping with the ethos of the New Hollywood renaissance. Star Wars was never intended to put an end to it. But Star Wars detonated like a neutron bomb over Hollywood. It rained down radioactive material and, very slowly, poisoned the entirety of American cinema. Thus, for five decades, Hollywood has been making and remaking Star Wars and more Star Wars, until American cinema is now essentially nothing but Star Wars. The fallout has been horrific for all involved: Out of a series of increasingly poor children’s films, we have forged a world in which vast numbers of people think The Empire Strikes Back is the greatest film ever made. 

As for Star Wars itself, it now epitomizes today’s Hollywood: It is a giant, bloated, lumbering, decaying intellectual property owned by a corporation of monstrous size and run by an incompetent who pumps out increasingly unsuccessful product without consequence. Like Hollywood, the ship does not need to sink because no one knows how to sail it in the first place.

III.

Hollywood’s reality distortion field can be justified in innumerable ways. As noted above, the first excuse is always money. But it is very unlikely that this is all about money. As Orson Welles once pointed out, if all you want to do is get rich, you would never go into an industry as unpredictable as the movies. Film production is an act of high-stakes gambling and all gamblers know they are going to lose far more often than they win. Why a particular film wins or loses is usually a mystery and as many good films have made money as bad films. If the people who make films make bad films, it is not the result of avaricious motives.

It is possible, of course, that the ultimate reason is stupidity. That is, it may be that the people who run Hollywood today simply aren’t particularly bright. If so, this would certainly be an anomaly. The men who built Hollywood and with it American cinema were often vulgar, corrupt, and abusive, but they were not stupid. They knew a good film when they saw one. They did not always make them, but they knew enough to recognize it when someone did. 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck, it is said, reacted to the horrendous preview results of The Grapes of Wrath by saying, “Ship it, don’t touch a foot.” 20th Century Fox, of course, is now owned by Disney. It is unthinkable that anyone at Disney today would find Zanuck’s decision even vaguely comprehensible, let alone worthy of imitation. American cinema may be dying because the people financing it are no smarter than the only films they are willing to make. Hollywood movies may be idiotic because Hollywood is run by idiots.

The real answer, however, may be much darker. It is not impossible that the barons of American cinema actually hate cinema. Unconsciously, they may despise their profession and the art form it is meant to facilitate. After all, Hollywood can be a famously ugly and dirty business. Not everyone involved in it is a Harvey Weinstein, but there are certainly enough Harvey Weinsteins to go around. Moreover, Hollywood is a business of dreams and most Hollywood dreams end up broken. The history of the movie business is littered with bodies, including such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. More recent tragedies like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger constitute further evidence. Perhaps those in charge believe that the only thing to do with such a Sodom is to burn it to the ground. Somewhere unknown even to it, Hollywood may hate itself. If so, the people of Los Angeles need not reenact The Day of the Locust; Hollywood will do it on its own.

Above the self-immolators, however, stand those who simply don’t care. Almost all the major studios are now owned by massive corporations with numerous interests well outside the media ecosystem. Their CEOs and board members certainly want to make money, but more likely than not, they don’t particularly care if their movies make money. The movie studios, after all, are just one part of a much larger conglomerate, and not a very lucrative one at that. The profits from the video game industry, for example, outstrip those of the film industry by orders of magnitude. As a result, no one at the top is paying much attention: People seem to like Marvel movies, so keep making them, now stop bothering me. In such a situation of depraved neglect, no one should expect much better.

Thus, it is tempting to throw up one’s hands and say: This is the economic reality and there’s nothing to be done about it. We will simply have to submit to the rise of an American non-cinema and even the outright demise of American cinema itself. This is certainly the easy way out, but it is not acceptable. Whether they like it or not, the denizens of Hollywood have social responsibilities. They know this to some extent, but they usually perceive it as an absolute obligation to pump out progressive advocacy films. In fact, their responsibility is of an entirely different kind.

This responsibility is to American civilization itself, because the cinema is America’s greatest cultural achievement. It far outstrips any other American art except perhaps popular music. It is a truism that the only indigenous American art forms are jazz and the Western movie. If there is a great American novel, it is Citizen Kane. Other countries like France, Russia, and Japan have made enormous contributions to the art of cinema, but no other country has so defined and redefined the art form as the United States. It exercised the most profound influence on world cinema and, when it encountered world cinema, proved expert at adapting it to its own needs. It is not a coincidence that Sergio Leone made Westerns, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard worshipped Orson Welles, and Akira Kurosawa’s aesthetic could not possibly have existed without John Ford. And ironically, without Kurosawa, Star Wars could never have been made.

This means that by impoverishing cinema, by dedicating itself to non-cinema, Hollywood is also impoverishing the United States. It is destroying one of the very few art forms in which the United States reigns supreme. An empty blockbuster or two is no great wound to American culture; nothing but blockbusters leaves all Americans with one less great art form and thus one less civilizational achievement. If American cinema dies, some piece of America dies with it. This, sadly, is what appears to be happening.

Renaissance, however, is not impossible. The cinema of the 1970s, for example, took shape after the most moribund period in Hollywood history. Given current trends, however, it is unlikely that the renaissance will come from Hollywood. The streaming services are promising, but as they begin to get a grip on which formulas work and which don’t, the experimentation they have fostered may well dissipate. More tantalizing is the prospect that something like the old pirates, the great independent producers like Alexander Korda, the Salkind family, and Mike Todd will step in. Operating outside of Hollywood, these impresarios managed to raise the enormous amounts of money necessary to make big and sometimes daring films like The Third Man, the Superman films, and Around the World in 80 Days. They have disappeared of late, but carnival barkery has been a constant throughout the history of the movies and a revival is not unthinkable.

The new pirates may prove to be the tech moguls. Elon Musk, after all, could finance a $100 million film out of petty cash. Laden with trillions of dollars, the tech moguls may come to see the movies as a magical ambition or simply an amusing pastime worth the relatively small investment. They may become something like the Renaissance patrons, taking specific artists under their wing and sponsoring their work. 

In a sense, Megalopolis is a model of what this might look like. Coppola is not a tech mogul and served as his own patron. But his willingness to spend the money to make a big film completely outside of Hollywood could be emulated by a richer man to higher returns. Megalopolis shows that very expensive but completely independent pictures can be made and successfully distributed in theaters with almost no help from Hollywood whatsoever.

Given the film’s meager box office receipts, Hollywood will no doubt see Megalopolis as a cautionary tale. But I think it is more than that. It is a strikeback, a judo throw, a protest against Hollywood’s decimation of itself. By bypassing Hollywood, Megalopolis repudiates it. The film’s failure was, in many ways, foreordained, but I think it will likely go down in history as some sort of great film. The question is whether it will prove to be the last great American film and perhaps the last American film worthy of being called a film. That is, American cinema may never produce something quite so original and daring again. Megalopolis is an act of cinema hurled into the void of Hollywood’s non-cinema. Whether it is also American cinema’s epitaph is an open question. The answer, I think, is not up to Hollywood but to other and better filmmakers yet to be born.