It isn’t looking good for Francis Ford Coppola‘s venture into science fiction with Megalopolis. According to a new report by The Hollywood Reporter, the production currently halfway through filming in Atlanta is not looking good. The biggest loss was that they lost their production designer and supervising art director, which followed losing the entire visual effects team back in December.
Coppola has self-financed the production and broken the Hollywood rule of “never spend your own money” even if it is a passion project. Megalopolis was a long-time project the filmmaker wanted to bring to life and was going to be produced with an impressive $120M budget, which he financed by selling his wineries in California. Yet, it seems that the budget has started to balloon.
Now, the big question remains if he can even finish his film, which is being teased as “absolute madness” behind-the-scenes. It seems one of the issues was they initially wanted to use The Mandalorian’s Volume technology which ended up being more costly than expected and are trying to go back to a green-screen approach.
It seems that Coppola was the one that fired most of the visual effects team with the department following shortly after. The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Mark Russell was leading as the production supervisor and it somewhat feels like a retread of what Coppola did in Dracula 30 years ago. Though generally his greatest hits have seemingly led to some questionable behind-the-scenes developments.
Production designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott have also left the project behind, which leaves the project with no art department at all. Yet, Coppola is still hiring new staff for the project. The only question remains if he can continue pushing forward or if he has to resign from his passion project after all.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
