Coppola Poured Money and Soul Into This Film. People Hate It

American film audiences got their first chance this weekend to weigh in on legend Francis Ford Coppola's decades-in-the-making film Megalopolis. No thanks, they replied.

• "There is no kind way to put it," writes Brooks Barns in the New York Times. The movie "died on arrival over the weekend." It's on track to finish sixth among new releases and bring in a paltry $4 million, below even the "worst-case" projections.
• Also troubling: Filmgoers who did see it gave it a "disastrous" D+ CinemaScore, notes the Hollywood Reporter. It's exceedingly rare for a big-name director to score so poorly. The film also has a not-so-great overall rating of 49% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. In it, Adam Driver stars as a genius architect at the center of what has been described as a retelling of Roman history set in modern America.

• Passion project: The 85-year-old Coppola began formulating the film back in the 1980s, and he financed the $120 million project himself, per the Los Angeles Times. He even sold off part of his wine business to do so. All things considered, that makes this weekend an "epic flop" for Coppola, it adds. However, the newspaper notes that the director has "proved doubters wrong" previously, as with Apocalypse Now. He poured millions of his own money into that film, which ended up grossing $100 million and being nominated for the best-picture Oscar.
• Perspective: "Like all true art, it will be viewed and judged by movie audiences over time," said Adam Fogelson of distributor Lionsgate. And some reviews are positively glowing: "With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made," writes Richard Brody at the New Yorker. While others, not so much. Lindsey Bahr of the AP calls it "nearly impossible to digest in a single, baffling viewing."
• Perspective, II: "The movie is an ambitious, personal vision," says analyst David A. Gross of movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, per Variety. "Sometimes a film like this beats the odds and makes a lot of money. This one is not working. The result is going to be a big tax write-off." The piece notes that Kevin Costner's own recent passion project, Horizon: An American Saga — Part One paused plans for part two because it similarly tanked with audiences (though Costner's opening numbers were better). Both examples may be a factor of a much-changed Hollywood, where remakes rule, per the Times.

(More Francis Ford Coppola stories.)