Megalopolis was plagued by controversy even before its extremely mixed reception at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now that it’s out in theaters, regular audiences have been even less forgiving than the critics. Hollywood has been calling it “Megaflopolis” for months, anticipating just how few people the movie would draw to theaters, and the prediction was all too true. Megalopolis is one of the most spectacular box-office flops in recent memory, which is all the more disastrous given that writer-director Francis Ford Coppola sunk $120 million of his money to self-fund this meandering sci-fi “fable” about an architect who wants to build a utopia.
