How Anthony Bourdain and a Treadmill Led to the Biggest Flop in Cinematic History
Whether you think it was a hilarious exercise in creative chaos or just a bunch of dumb bullshit, you can’t deny that Francis Ford Coppola’s dubiously guided epic Megalopolis was a box-office disaster. Having brought in only about $4 million, it had the worst opening weekend of any widely released film with a budget over $100 million in history. (Only 2002’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash comes out ahead, but after adjusting for inflation, it can’t even claim that honor.)
How did this happen? Well, being a man, Coppola spends a lot of time thinking about the Roman empire. He’s wanted to make a movie about it set in modern-day New York City since the 1970s, but almost as if the universe was trying to tell him something, life always got in the way. A string of box-office failures meant he had to focus on the surefire hits, like *consults notes* 1996’s Jack. Actors who had been cast years earlier had aged out of their roles. An entire 9/11 happened. These are what we call “signs.”
And Coppola might have heeded them if he hadn’t gotten a call from celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. “Around 2017 or so, Anthony Bourdain invited me to come on to his travel show,” he said. “(He) came and visited Palazzo Margherita, our hideaway in Italy,” but when Coppola saw himself on the show, “I thought, ‘I look like a whale.’”
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Coppola owes his career to his ripped physique, so he had to get back on track, but when you’re a multi-Oscar winner, you can’t just go on Whole 30 like the rest of us. He traveled all the way to North Carolina to enroll in a five-month weight-loss program at Duke University, and while we aren’t privy to all the details of the plan, Coppola said it included a “strict regimen of exercise.” And you know how boring those can get. You need good entertainment if you’re going to log any serious miles on the Peloton or NordicTrack, and Coppola was grasping at straws.
“I started listening to some of the readings of Megalopolis,” he said, referring to table readings he’d staged in 2001 with the likes of Nicolas Cage, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Gandolfini, Jon Hamm, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Uma Thurman. You know, “just for the hell of it,” he said, but then, “I thought, ‘This feels more relevant than ever.’ I realized that even though the script was 20 years old, I could still do it.”
To be fair, when he said “I could still do it,” he knew that meant going it alone. No studio was ever going to touch it, so he financed the project entirely on his own by selling off his wineries, which is now a thing you know existed. (The wines are named after members of his family. It’s cute.) Does he particularly need the money? Probably not. Does it bother him terribly that nobody wanted to see his unhinged magnum opus? Who knows?
He almost certainly, however, did not set out to set new records in cinematic lows, and that, folks, is why you don’t exercise.
