Coppola has a long history of big productions that failed at the box office. ‘Megalopolis’ faces its legacy

It is indisputable: Francis Ford Coppola has signed some of the best films in the history of cinemaand many of them have been overwhelming box office successes: the trilogy of ‘The Godfather‘ It was extraordinarily profitable (it cost seven million dollars and raised almost three hundred); ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ had a complicated shooting but he ended up earning more than five times his budget; and ‘Apocalypse Now’… well, that movie It almost took out most of those responsibleso the fact that it didn’t end up in the red is already a miracle.

But it hasn’t been like that for most of his career. Coppola’s filmography is full of small and large setbacks that have made him an absolutely unpredictable director. At the moment, there is already talk of some abysmal forecasts for the collection of ‘Megalopolis’, so this ambitious satirical epic with touches of science fiction could fall on the side of failures. But… is that fame fair? Does your career have so many punctures? Let’s review some of them.

The bottom of the barrel

Let’s start at the end: for the past few decades, Coppola has remained on the sidelines of the industry, self-producing very modest films and with an extremely small budget, as we will see. Not even that has stopped them from hitting the box office, usually due to distribution problems and, let’s face it, an almost amateur very unattractive. Among them are:

• Tetro (2009): A teenager runs away from his father and gets a job on a boat. When he arrives in Argentina he decides to look for his brother, who also left home pursuing his dream of being a playwright. But the man she finds is different from the one she remembered. Thanks to Vincent Gallo’s performance, the film was well received, but crashed at the box officeas it only recovered half of its already meager $5 million budget.
• Twixt (2011): A vampire delirium starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning in which a writer has bizarre hallucinations after seeing the corpse of a dead man under strange circumstances. Based, according to Coppola himself, on a nightmare, it cost just $7 million. However, only raised 647,839.

First punctures

But Coppola’s career was marked from his first films by setbacks at the box office. The eighties were especially cruel to him, and after the successes of ‘The Godfather’ and its sequels or ‘Apocalypse Now’, he couldn’t quite find the key to popular acceptance. Some examples:

• Rebels (1983): Although over time it has ended up becoming a cult film due, above all, to the fact that its entire cast ended up becoming stars (note: Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Thomas C. Howell, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon and Diane Lane), this film about youth gangs, knife attacks and teenage troubles did not quite connect with the public. With its 25 million in collection over 10 of the budget, It certainly wasn’t a failure.but let’s remember that Coppola had just revolutionized cinema and box office with the one hundred million from ‘Apocalypse Now’, so it counts as a small financial disappointment.
• The Law of the Street (1983): One of Coppola’s most unanimously praised films, on par with his great classics. But unlike them, and despite being based on a youth best-seller, it did not work at the box office. The plot focuses on the relationship between two brothers (very young Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon) and their conflictive relationship with the youth gangs of the time. Visually captivating, with elements reminiscent of German Expressionism and the French New Wave, only raised about two and a half million of the ten million dollars it had in the budget.
• Stone Gardens (1987): Recovering the great James Caan from ‘The Godfather’, Coppola signed this conventional military drama about the years of maturity of a sergeant who is not satisfied with his professional destiny after fighting in Vietnam and Korea. The war theme, even coming from Coppola, was no guarantee of anything, since it did not raise not even half of the 13 million dollars it cost.
• New York Stories (1989): An episodic film co-directed with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese that told stories set in the cinematographic city of skyscrapers. Scorsese’s episode was unanimously praised, but it also didn’t connect: of its $15 million budget he only recovered 10.

The great disaster

And we left for last what was Coppola’s most notorious failure. ‘Hunch’, a 1982 film starring Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr that had financing problems from the start. It cost 26 million dollars and only raised 716,612, without even reaching one million in income. A true disaster that ended up gaining deserved fame as one of the biggest financial fiascos in Hollywood history.

In it we are told about the comings and goings of a couple of young lovers who break up their relationship in Las Vegas and begin a series of parallel relationships and also encounters and disagreements, in a hyper-aesthetic film (It started as a romantic comedy and ended up triggering its ambition) and which includes kidnappings for love, musical numbers and scenarios of very notable complexity. The film was financed entirely by Coppola through his own Zoetrope Studios.

In order for filming to continue, Coppola had to reduce his crew’s salaries and MGM, which was going to distribute the film, abandoned the project. Coppola had to turn to private investors and invented saving methods such as filming and editing a kind of pre-planning on video to later use as a reference when it came time to shoot. In 1982 it was a revolutionary idea.

Because Coppola has never lacked revolutionary breath. His cinema, overflowing with ideas and ambition, also oozes films that have not connected with the public, and that Now he faces, perhaps, the most ambitious test of his career. Very soon we will know if ‘Megalopolis’, a project that Coppola has cherished since the eighties, ends up going down in history as one more in the director’s long list of box office failures. Or even as the most distinguished of all.

In Xataka | Neither ‘Blade Runner’ nor futuristic science fiction: the great inspiration for Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ is the Roman Empire