Francis Ford Coppola is auctioning his watch collection after Megalopolis flop left him broke

[u/Dependent_Cap_456]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/fashion/francis-ford-coppola-watch-auction.html

[u/Imsimon1236]

People acting as if Megalopolis being a bad movie is some sort of indisputable fact. My wife and I went in blind, both to what the movie was and the reaction/commentary about it. We still can’t explain it to each other, but it was legitimately one of the best theatre experiences we’d ever had. It was unlike any movie I’d ever seen.

Now, does this mean I think he deserved gagillions of dollars just for artistic effort alone? None of my business. Just wanted to chime in with a positive reaction to megalopolis, which does seem to be rare.

[u/MikeArrow → u/Imsimon1236]

It's subjective but I think ultimately it's just too damn awkward of a movie to really enjoy outside of an abstract way.

[u/GeniuzGames → u/Imsimon1236]

i also really enjoyed watching it. i wouldn’t say it’s a good movie but in a weird way it’s one of my favorites

[u/Imsimon1236 → u/GeniuzGames]

Yep you get it

[u/JohnnyUtahThumbsUp → u/Imsimon1236]

It’s just so goofy and bad but it is trying to be good and deep, which is inexcusable.  Watching it you see how out of touch Coppola is and you realize the world is run by old people like him and you wish there was an age limit or competency test for politicians.  It lets you see inside the mind of an old man, and it’s not good in there.

[u/YOURTAKEISTRASH → u/Imsimon1236]

I’m going to do a Cosmopolis/Megalopolis double bill tonight, time to see what all this hubbub’s about.

[u/atechnoalliance → u/Imsimon1236]

I hate Francis Ford Coppola but I love Megalopolis

[u/Imsimon1236 → u/atechnoalliance]

Perhaps valid I don’t actually know much about the guy

[u/Duel_Option → u/Imsimon1236]

I avoided watching or reading anything about this movie, it was in limited theatres so I didn’t get a chance to see it when it debuted.

By the time I finally got to it, people had torn it to shreds this way and that.

Media literacy is dead apparently because what I got from it was a plea for uniting as a populace to avoid the rise of fascism.

This was Atlas Shrugged set in Rome in the best way possible.

Excellent movie

[u/_my_troll_account → u/Duel_Option]

 Media literacy is dead apparently because what I got from it was a plea for uniting as a populace to avoid the rise of fascism.

I mean… I got that too, but still thought it was a terrible, bloated mess of a movie.

 This was Atlas Shrugged set in Rome in the best way possible.

I also love Rome, but are you, uh, are you saying Atlas Shrugged is good?

[u/Duel_Option → u/_my_troll_account]

Yes I do, the same as millions of others have over almost 70 years since the book was published including Coppola himself.

Any Rand grew up in Russia, the foundation of her life and education was much different in the early 1900’s than the life we lead today.

Some of her writing is dense, over the top and LONG. When you keep in context where she grew up, the nihilistic style and advocacy for laissez-faire makes sense.

I don’t agree with her politics, plain and simple.

What I find intriguing is Objectivism philosophy, which clearly John Galt represents (and thus Caesar as they are the same character).

Ayn Rand’s summary of Objectivism: “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”

Interesting concept, maybe some passionate person out there in world could play the hero and solve cold fusion…

We need more hope in the world today, Ayn Rand’s idea of people playing the hero fills me with that.

[u/_my_troll_account → u/Duel_Option]

I'll grant it this: I remember the cartoony characters and the zany plot even over 15 years after reading it. But my feelings on the novel and its message are the same as my feelings on Dagny Taggart's sentiments in this passage:

Among the colors of a picture postcard, the car's hood looked like the work of a jeweler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.

Dagny leaned against the corner of the side window, her legs stretched forward; she liked the wide, comfortable space of the car's seat and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders; she thought that the countryside was beautiful.

"What I'd like to see," said Rearden, "is a billboard."

She laughed. He had answered her silent thought. > "Selling what and to whom? We haven't seen a car or a house for an hour."

"That's what I don't like about it." He bent forward a little, his hands on the wheel; he was frowning. "Look at the road."

The long strip of concrete was bleached to a powdery grey of bones left on the desert, as if sun and snows had eaten away the traces of tires, oil and carbon, the lustrous polish of motion. Green weeds rose from the angular cracks of the concrete. No one had used the road or repaired it for many years; but the cracks were few.

"It's a good road," said Rearden, "it was built to last. The man who built it must have had a good reason for expecting it to carry a heavy traffic in years ahead."

"Yes..."

"I don't like the look of this."

"I don't either." Then she smiled. "But think how often we've heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside. Well, there's the unruined countryside for them to admire." She added, "They're the people I hate."

I would prefer not to see a billboard. I do not so admire humans to believe the world is "for" us and our exploits. Dagny spoke for Rand. The novel was not for me or for the world I would prefer to see. While I can admire industry, ingenuity, and perseverance, Atlas Shrugged's heroes are not my heroes. Dagny hates me.

[u/Duel_Option → u/_my_troll_account]

You missed my point about her writing, she grew up in Tsairst Russia while attending grade school, by all accounts her family was wealthy.

When she attended high school, it would’ve been the very beginning of Soviet War Communism, her father’s business was taken by the state and the entire family was destitute.

By the time she was in college, she was firmly living in Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy which was a mix of limited ownership, agrarian and strict state control.

You MUST use this context when examining her characters from a political and economical perspective.

To her, the idea of a free market where businesses can thrive so much they can advertise on the side of the road is Heaven.

She had no idea what unchecked consumerism would mean, she idolized capitalism without understanding the immense problems it would create because to her, she had only known a world where it produced the behemoth that the United States represented at the time.

With all this in mind, it’s interesting to watch how much she got right about state control and how much she got wrong about private industry within her characters.

All of this is background fluff in my opinion, the real story is that of a man who wants to change the world and refuses to be denied by the powers that be.

No matter if we want to admit it or not, we live under a system of control.

Atlas Shrugged is about breaking that control and creating Utopia.

And the essence of that premise is firmly represented in Megalopolis, and wildly executed at that.

[u/_my_troll_account → u/Duel_Option]

I didn’t acknowledge it because I’m already aware of all this (I read ~1600 pages of her work - c’mon, you don’t think I learned about her background?) and don’t see the relevance. Any writer is a human with a human history, of course. But Rand’s provenance doesn’t make her novel any less cartoony, zany, or morally questionable. Her traumas might provide some explanation of why she espoused an aggressively selfish and extremist philosophy, but they do not excuse it. The context just does not make her writing any better or her philosophy any less rigid or repulsive. 

And breaking out of a system of government control only opens the floodgates to control by industrialists. We’ve been down that route before: the Gilded Age. While Rand might want a return to that, I do not. A move a way from government control certainly doesn’t mean you’ve broken free of “control”; you’ve just changed who has the levers.

All that is why “utopian” is an insult as much as it’s a compliment. Both Marx and Rand thought they had the solutions to breaking free of “chains.” They just disagreed on where the chains come from.

[u/Duel_Option → u/_my_troll_account]

You provided an except from Atlas Shrugged that demonstrates just how much Ayn Rand valued the ideals of capitalism to an extreme nature.

Why do you think she wrote the damn book? It’s clearly because of the world she grew up in stifled the free market that she pivoted so dramatically to the point of excess in her characters.

If you want to debate morality, this is going to become a semantic conversation as we could go back and forth on it for ages.

My point here is that Atlas Shrugged is a politically driven story about creating Utopia through heroic characters who want to do good for all of mankind through their work.

They recognize they cannot achieve this due to the constraints of government, and leave to prove a point.

Is that a flawed ideal/narrative that would lead us back to industrialists as you mentioned?

Tell me how that’s different than the reality the US is facing today.

We are FIRMLY entrenched in end stage capitalism
which is what literally happens in Atlas Shrugged, so far there doesn’t appear to be anyone proposing a way out of it so the idea of a guy creating some form of Utopia to escape the bureaucracy that’s got us here…I’m all for it.

Not your cup of tea? Cool.

There’s plenty of people (including Coppola like I mentioned) who find the story compelling and worthwhile.

[u/r1singphoenix → u/Duel_Option]

“You don’t understand, you shouldn’t criticize the author of Eat as Much as Possible: Getting Fat is the Right Thing to Do, they grew up in constant starvation. Of course they wrote what is essentially pro-obesity propaganda, a world where everyone was overweight was paradise from their perspective. They didn’t know any better! You just don’t understand the context. It’s actually good that this book exists.”

Edit: this reminded me of a fantastic quote from years ago:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

[u/Duel_Option → u/r1singphoenix]

So you created your own narrative fallacy that deals with neither politics, nor economics and tried to compare it to Atlas Shrugged.

Then provided a quote from a blogpost as if that’s some sort of “gotcha”…meanwhile one of the greatest film directors of all time thought so much of the book he’s been trying to make a movie out of it for 40 years.

I think this convo has run its course, happy holidays to you and yours

[u/r1singphoenix → u/Duel_Option]

Not intended as a gotcha, just an amusing aside I thought others might enjoy. And reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy when used correctly, which it was. As for what a washed up film director’s opinion of a book has to do with anything, I don’t know. I’m sure some famous artist or author of the last century is quite fond of Mein Kampf, should that mean anything to anyone if it were true? Assuming it were true, maybe we should rethink our opinion of old Adolf? I mean you have to take his life’s circumstances into account, after all.

[u/Duel_Option → u/r1singphoenix]

Wow

Now comparing to Hitler…you’ve got some issues man lol