'Megalopolis' and The Least Popular Genre of All Time

Why do audiences never love utopian tales as much as their dark dystopian cousins? Graham Williamson on why we don't want to dream of a perfect future

A still from Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, starring Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel. Photo: Collection Christophel/Alamy

To describe Francis Ford Coppola's new film Megalopolis as divisive is like saying the French Revolution was a mild disagreement. Among the $120 million, self-financed film's supporters, the New Yorker's Richard Brody described it as an "artistic rejuvenation... giddily spectacular", while at the Financial Times Danny Leigh praised it for "channelling the silent era's fearless scale and possibility".

On the negative side, The AV Club's Nathan Rabin called it "an ambitious art film so bad it made me hate ambition, art and film", while Mark Kermode – after opening by calling it one of the worst films he'd ever seen – described it as "stunningly dull and very, very, very, very full of itself".

So far, the audience response seems to align with Rabin and Kermode, with a limp $4 million US opening weekend. Coppola is unlikely to be surprised, having promoted the film with a trailer that included negative reviews of his previous classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. (The trailer had to be withdrawn when it was discovered that the quotes – credited to legendary writers like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert – were AI-generated, and were not written by the credited critics)

One reason why Megalopolis is failing to connect with some audiences, though, has nothing to do with Coppola's reputation or even the film's own merits. It is an example of perhaps the most consistently unpopular genre of all time – utopian fiction.