Budget: $120 million [source]
Opening weekend gross: $4 million
Factoring in marketing costs and the theaters taking their cut of the profits, Megalopolis would need to make at least $300 million to break even. I think it’s safe to say that’s not happening.
It would have been THE worst opening for a $100 million movie ever, had it not been for Pluto Nash’s horriffic opening 22 years ago.
Even The New York Times is reporting near-empty screenings of Megalopolis!
It’s definitely worth watching. I can’t say I fully understood it on one watch, the time stopping ability is clearly a metaphor, but I’m not settled on what for yet.
It started with Caesar, then passed collaboratively to his wife, then their baby.
Edit I’ve been thinking about it tonight and I think I have it…
At the start, the Architect can stop time, as an architect, he has the ability to form a lasting, permanent impression on the world around him. His posterity as it were.
Through the film, he loses that level of influence, and similarly loses the ability to stop time.
When he falls in love, he regains a level of influence over his destiny, and so does she. They can stop time together, but not separately.
The film ends with their baby stopping time, as his permanent impact on the world has been transferred to a new generation. Father and mother are frozen in time as the baby moves forward.
Edit Having now seen it a 2nd time on UHD, yes, I think I had it right.
Bonus - the UHD is not avaiable in the US, but it is region free if you import it from the UK. The Blu Ray that comes with it has the bonus features and it’s region locked, but that’s a solvable problem.
I can’t stand Adam Driver personally
I’ve actually been looking forward to this, ans this is the first I’ve heard if it actually releasing.
I don’t know what’s up with film marketing these past few years, but I miss almost all of it, despite being interested.
Why would anybody spend $300 million on a movie nowadays? If this isn’t Avatar or Deadpool, it’s not going to make it back.
I think for someone like that, it isn’t about the money, it’s about making your artistic vision happen, using the clout you built elsewhere to push through a project that was never financially viable but it’s your dream as a filmmaker.
Sometimes those stories end up becoming some of the biggest movies of all time, but often they just end up being a big waste of money except for the guy who gots to make his dream movie.
Do you have other examples of such movies in mind?
The Thief and the Cobbler is one, it was massively expensive and destroyed the studio, but it was the animator’s magnum opus he worked on for 30 years.
Showgirls was one of the movies Paul Verhoven pushed for as a personal project, and it literally destroyed the careers of some of the people who were part of the project (and gave many of us a chance to see tits on basic cable at 15, so your sacrifice will not be forgotten)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a first of its kind, a photorealistic movie, but the cost and the fact that the movie just wasn’t very good basically destroyed the studio after one picture.
Disney’s Treasure Planet was intended to be the magnum opus of its creators, but ended up being a nail in the coffin of disney animated movies.
Cameron’s Avatar is an example in the other direction, where it was this weird movie about blue aliens he really wanted to make that ended up making all of the money. His movie Titanic is another weird one, where you have a 3 and a half hour historical romance that became the top movie on earth.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception was also mind bendingly popular, and one of the films he used his clout to create.
I also heard about a movie from 1980 called Heaven’s Gate which destroyed the director, the studio, and essentially ended the era of director-led movies because studios were too gun-shy after that bomb to let that happen again.
So as you can see, these sort of risky auteur films can either be the biggest flops or the biggest home runs, it really depends on the film and the world around it in that moment.
