Francis Ford Coppola had a plan—or seemed to have one, at least. When the famed director of The Godfather walked onto the stage of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre after a screening of his latest film, 2024’s Megalopolis, he told the audience that he intended “to change the world tonight.” An assistant wheeled out a whiteboard listing the 10 topics Coppola wanted to discuss: time, work, money, politics, education, law, war, art, religion, and celebration. By the time the talk ended two hours later, however, the 86-year-old filmmaker had covered only five of the items; almost half of the audience had trickled out; and the world appeared regrettably unchanged.
Billed as “An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola,” the event earlier this month was the last stop in a six-city road tour meant to honor Megalopolis by indulging in an in-depth study of its themes. The whiteboard, the 10-pronged approach to fixing human society, the hours of unmoderated discussion—all of it was an apparent attempt to build the mythology of a film released less than a year ago that had already seemed to be forgotten. Movies have been resuscitated before: Now-beloved films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Princess Bride, and The Big Lebowski have for decades been embraced by audiences after being overlooked during their initial releases. But as much as Megalopolis fits the vague outlines of notoriety that could one day make it a cult classic—Coppola’s epic film, which envisioned America as a retro-futuristic version of the Roman empire, was critically derided, dramatically underperformed at the box office, and endured a shaky behind-the-scenes production that involved the director plopping down $120 million of his own money—its revival feels different.
Indeed, the response to Coppola’s cross-country tour came off less like the beginnings of an underground fan base, and more like a film community tolerating an auteur’s exhaustive defense of his work. “The Coppola thing’s a bit unusual,” Jamie Sexton, a film professor studying cult cinema at Northumbria University, in England, told me. The director seems to be a one-man army who’s attempting, Sexton said, “to facilitate a cult following.” Of course, the notion of a “cult film” has grown nebulous over time: Many movies that have been bestowed the title, such as Blade Runner and This Is Spinal Tap, gained widespread popularity anyway, and the proliferation of streaming services makes it easier for people to discover nearly any movie on their own. But rather than allow audiences to organically find Megalopolis, Coppola has made it hard to screen legally. (The film is currently unavailable to stream in North America.) Rather than wait for reevaluations of it to emerge over time, Coppola initiated the conversation from his end.
Coppola, for his part, leaned into the weirdness of his endeavor. During the live events, he covered topics as varied as education reform, the benefits of jury duty, and the oppressiveness of time—only very loosely linking them all to Megalopolis. The director, who wore mismatched socks onstage, beseeched his audience to ask him anything. One attendee pressed him to discuss the allure of organic architecture. Another thrust a hand into the air for a two-part question: First, did Coppola have anything to share about a third cut of Apocalypse Now, and second, could Coppola please sign the custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle he’d designed to honor the director’s filmography? (It was parked right outside!) Coppola answered most queries patiently, but always turned back to the guiding principles on his whiteboard.
His efforts to reintroduce Megalopolis to the public demonstrate the challenge of transforming a flop into a cult classic. No formula exists for that process, but the building—and maintaining—of underground-hit status, Sexton told me, requires audiences to take full control of a work’s legacy. Regardless of cinematic quality, such projects tend to be transgressive in some compelling manner, enough to inspire devotion: They’re thematically controversial, stylistically challenging, or simply enjoyable in ways that fans want to passionately defend. “There is a special flavor to the cult following when the art is not considered mainstream, because that fills you with a sense of almost conspiratorial-style comfort,” Amanda Montell, the author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and a co-host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, told me. “Like, I have access to something that the sheep do not.” Viewers grant these movies a rarefied status by continuously rallying behind them and pushing for them to be reconsidered by critics and mainstream audiences. When studios try to mobilize niche fandoms, however, by rereleasing much-memed movies, fast-tracking sequels, and coining portmanteaus, that interest seldom translates into sustainable, influential communities. The power to define a film’s fate after its release rests with the consumers, not the creators.
Even so, Coppola’s decision to take the reins appears to have worked to some extent: Several stops on the tour sold out, and a handful of attendees the night I went shouted at the filmmaker to release Megalopolis on Blu-ray in North America. But none of it proves that Megalopolis has finally won audiences over. If anything, the continued fascination with the film illustrates the appeal of self-mythology—of watching a filmmaker define the personal stakes of his work, examine his career, and tie his own worldview so closely to a single project. Montell explained that Coppola’s strategy seemed to involve “Frankensteining” the practices that materialize around cult movies (hard-to-access screenings, dissections of their production) with the circuitous chatter that can surround cults of personality. By showing up to appreciate the flaws of the film—and of its maker’s aspirations—the audience countered critical consensus and displayed unconventional taste. Some of that involves direct participation, which, for many cult films, can turn into rituals: During screenings of The Room, audiences toss plastic spoons at the screen. During The Rocky Horror Picture Show, they sing along. During Megalopolis, at least at the San Francisco showing, an especially passionate group in the audience cheered during a scene that had gone viral, chanting “club” alongside the protagonist, the visionary inventor Cesar, played by Adam Driver.
Spontaneous responses such as that may indicate the beginnings of a cult legacy. But for all of Coppola’s insistence that his film’s themes are hugely relevant to today’s society, answering the question of whether a movie as strange and ambitious as Megalopolis will truly find a fervent audience, Sexton said, requires patience: “For me, there has to be some kind of endurance beyond the buzz.” An upcoming making-of documentary will further test the film’s potential longevity. Until then, what Coppola has done is willed an ephemeral following into being, for just six nights—and maybe, for him, for now, that’s enough. After all, Sexton pointed out, “he doesn’t have to do this.”
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