Megadoc (2025)

I tried to watch Megalopolis three times. I finished Megadoc on the first try. That says something.That movie is a mess. It’s not for me. I do not like it.

But after watching Megadoc, I respect the hell out of Francis Ford Coppola.

This documentary chronicles Coppola’s decades-long quest to make Megalopolis - a film he first conceived in the 1970s, after the Godfather films made him the most powerful director in Hollywood. What followed was a career defined by swinging big and often missing: Apocalypse Now nearly killed him, One From the Heart bankrupted his studio, and he spent the next several decades financing passion projects by directing studio work he didn’t care about. He built American Zoetrope with the dream of creating an artist-led alternative to the Hollywood machine. It mostly didn’t work. He lost fortunes. He sold his winery - the thing that actually made money - to self-finance Megalopolis when no studio would touch it.

Coppola has always put his money where his mouth is. Literally. Repeatedly. To his own financial ruin.

We need more people like him making audacious, crazy art - even when it doesn’t work, even when it’s not for me. The film industry is dominated by IP, algorithms, and risk-averse executives. Coppola represents something endangered: a filmmaker who believes in auteur-driven cinema so deeply he’ll bankrupt himself for it. He’s one of the least business savvy people alive. But god damn it, I love him for it.

The dream matters, even when the movie doesn’t land.

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