Francis Ford Coppola is already planning to re-release “Megalopolis.” The auteur has famously recut a slew of his most iconic features, including “Apocalypse Now.” Soon, “Megalopolis” will also be revisited in the edit room, with Coppola teasing that the proudly Razzie award-winning epic will be “more weird” with the recut.
“It was [originally] more weird,” Coppola said during the New Jersey leg of his tour for the 2024 film (via the World of Reel). “I own the picture, I can do anything I want with it.” The recut will include added deleted dream sequences that will make the film “weirder.”
Coppola said that he cut certain sequences from the final film “because already people were saying this film was so weird.”
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“Megalopolis” stars Adam Driver as architect Cesar Catilina, who strives to create a utopian city while battling Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, and Aubrey Plaza co-star in the Cannes feature that Coppola self-funded for $120 million. It will soon be turned into a graphic novel with an October 2025 release.
Coppola is on tour with Live Nation to screen the feature across the U.S. The tour is titled “An Evening With Francis Ford Coppola and ‘Megalopolis,’” and the director is going to six different cities. After the feature, Coppola will participate in an interactive discussion with the audience about the theme of “How to Change Our Future.”
“Megalopolis” has not yet been made available on any streaming platforms. The tour will be the first time the film is brought back 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 from THR.
The making of “Megalopolis” was captured in documentary “Megadoc,” which will debut at Venice 2025. Mike Figgis directs the documentary which is billed as a serious look into the controversial and convoluted production of Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”
Figgis said in a press statement, “Francis gave me access to everything, including the amazing archive material he’s accumulated of the many readings of the script as it went from one version to another. I was more or less free to go where I wanted. The cast were open about the working situation and how they were dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Francis and his very individual working methods. What a privilege to be a witness to such a moment in film history.”
According to Coppola, “Megadoc” will showcase the many versions of the truth about what it really was like to film “Megalopolis” in Georgia. “The great filmmaker Mike Figgis shot the making of ‘Megalopolis’ as he saw it,” Coppola said. “Interestingly, there are many interpretations of what really happened and it’s all in the documentary although the documentary doesn’t always say which is what. It is for the viewer to behold and interpret.”
