Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive epic hits UK cinemas today – but if it isn’t your cup of tea, why isn’t there anything on for you?
Let’s get this out of the way at the start: I didn’t hate Megalopolis.
Whatever its objective merits, I enjoyed the swing-and-miss boldness of Coppola’s 40-year passion project. It’s odd, crass, and often looks like it was shot under a fluorescent strip. There’s no commercial reason anything like it should exist, which only makes it more appealing.
I recognise, however, that plenty of people will hate it. Oh, people will hate this film. They’ll hate the way Adam Driver occasionally moves his hands like a close-up magician mid-sentence; they’ll hate how the production design budget seems to have been cut off with 50% of the film yet to shoot; they’ll hate how Aubrey Plaza delivers the line: “You’re anal as hell – I, on the other hand, am oral as hell”, and they’ll really hate what she does afterwards. There’s much to hate in Megalopolis, most of it pretty difficult to argue with.
The vast majority of people, however, will have no opinion on Megalopolis, because they will never see it. The same thing happened with the release of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid last year – another long, completely bonkers passion project never really destined to claw back much of its $35m budget on the big screen. Speaking to Vanity Fair in the months following its release, the mind behind Hereditary and Midsommar summed up the situation pretty well.
“I fantasize about [a time when] a film like this might’ve come out and divided audiences,” he said. “And it would’ve made people excited to go to the theater in order to determine how they felt themselves, as opposed to just people hearing, ‘Oh, the response is all over the board, so I’m not going to bother.’”
Have audiences really become less adventurous in their cinema tastes – or have they just been stung too many times before? Like it or not, for many people, the big screen has become the home of ‘event cinema’, and little else. I’d struggle to find many friends and family who’ve been to the multiplex enough times in 2024 to trouble the fingers on a second hand. When the average person is willing to leave the house for a couple of new films a year, is it really reasonable to expect them to choose Megalopolis over, say, Inside Out 2?
The usual refrain in situations like this is that the big screen has become too expensive, but I’m not so sure that’s true. The average price of a cinema ticket has actually risen slightly below inflation since 2000 – when attendance in the UK was at its highest since the 1970s.
Instead, we turn to the other favourite theory of cinema’s decline – the breaking of habit. In mass audiences’ defence, studios and distributors have made forming a weekly or monthly multiplex habit really bloody difficult of late. In the last month, for example, wide releases from major studios (the sort you’re likely to find in your local multiplex) have included (and been limited to): Megalopolis; Kate Winslet war-biopic Lee; psychological horror Speak No Evil and comedy-horror legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Let’s assume, for sake of argument, you’re an audience member that doesn’t like horror films. Nothing wrong with that, and you’re certainly not alone. Speak No Evil is almost certainly a no-go for you, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is unlikely to be your cup of tea either.
That leaves your options open to Megalopolis and Lee. After looking at reviews and coming to the conclusion that Megalopolis might be a bit weird for your taste (it is probably too weird for most people’s tastes), you settle on the relatively safe option of Lee – which is naff. Now, an entire month has gone by, you’ve been offered exactly one film which might appeal to your completely reasonable palette, and it was rubbish. It’s also distributed by Sky Cinema, so you’re pretty sure it’ll end up on telly before Christmas. In your view, Hollywood’s output in September has had a 100% miss rate. It’s hardly going to make you want to try again next month (when much of what’s on is geared towards Halloween anyway) is it?
Read more: Film Quiz Friday | Coppola Questions
Despite the one-two punch of Covid and strike action, it’s not so much a lack of raw film output from the creative community, either. Arguably, the real impact of the writers’ strike in particular hasn’t even started to hit. Also in cinemas this week are a couple of very watchable gems: coming-of-age comedy-drama My Old Ass, and Saoirse Ronan vehicle The Outrun. Distributed by Curzon and StudioCanal respectively, you’ll struggle to find either in your local multiplex, and neither have seen the kind of marketing budget to expand their reach beyond the most in-the-know of cinephile circles.
Rather than buying up smaller projects and giving them a bigger marketing push, however, studios have been shoving old hits – The Dark Knight Trilogy, Spider-Man, and one or two other films not featuring spandex – back onto the big screen via their own distribution wings. It’s an easy way to save face, I suppose; if no-one goes to see The Dark Knight Rises in 2024, who cares? It’s already made Warner Bros a billion dollars. If they used the same resources to promote something like, say, Alice Lowe’s Timestalker, there’ll be plenty of people queuing up to point at a graph telling them how much money they just lost.
But cinemas, as closures over the last year have shown, can’t survive on “event cinema” alone. Even if putting a modicum of distribution energy behind smaller films loses studios money in the short term, it might just be essential to making a cinema-going habit not even likely, but actually possible for the vast majority of people.
Instead, this weekend, multiplexes across the country are putting their eggs in a single, German expressionism-inspired basket. Part of me hopes it will end well. Most of me knows it will not.
Megalopolis, My Old Ass and The Outrun are in UK cinemas now.
