‘Megalopolis’ New Trailer Calls Out Critics, Shows Adam Driver Footage

Francis Ford Coppola has taken audiences deeper into “Megalopolis” with a second trailer for his new epic film, debuting in U.S. theaters via Lionsgate on Sept. 27.

In the new trailer, which opens with the line, “True genius is often misunderstood,” Coppola shades critics over the years who panned his most legendary movies, from 1972’s “The Godfather” to “Apocalypse Now,” cycling through excerpts from famous film critics’ negative reviews.

“One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” says a narrator. The new trailer positions Coppola’s latest epic, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival to mixed reviews, as a film that will win over audiences and age well, proving the critics wrong.

Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight and Jason Schwartzman, “Megalopolis” follows the collapse of a future American empire while referencing the fall of Rome. It marks the culmination of a decades-long project from the Coppola, who started working on the “Megalopolis” screenplay in the 1980s. He believes in the film so much that he invested $120 million of his own money into it.

A month after its divisive Cannes premiere, which nonetheless earned the film a seven-minute standing ovation, “Megalopolis” finally landed a theatrical partner in Lionsgate, alongside a global commitment from Imax.

Asked about the state of the film industry at Cannes — in light of the self-financed “Megalopolis” — Coppola said, “I fear that the film industry has become more of a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations because the studios are in great, great debt. And the job is not so much to make good movies, the job is to make sure they pay their debt obligations. Obviously, new companies like Amazon and Apple and Microsoft, they have plenty of money, so it might be that the studios we knew for so long, some wonderful ones, are not to be here in the future anymore.”

In his review, Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge called the film “positively awe-inspiring in some places and an absolute eyesore in others.”

“‘Megalopolis’ is anything but lazy, and while so many of the ideas don’t pan out as planned, this is the kind of late-career statement devotees wanted from the maverick, who never lost his faith in cinema,” Debruge wrote of Coppola.

Watch the new trailer for “Megalopolis” below.