Francis Ford Coppola Says He Doesn’t Have “Any Money” for His Post-Megalopolis Movie

Francis Ford Coppola has run out of vineyards to sell. The director of The Godfather, The Conversation, and more iconic films is hard at work on his next movie, but he recently told Rick Rubin on his Tetragammaton podcast that it’s going to have a smaller budget than his previous film, Megalopolis, because “I don’t have any money.”

Coppola described his next project, an adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel Glimpses of the Moon, as a “’30s-style strange musical” when interviewed by the Washington Post last December. Now, he’s facing the budget limitations from Megalopolis’s failure to recoup the $120 million he invested in it. Said Coppola on the podcast:

“It’s as though Noel Coward adapted an Edith Wharton novel in England which is why I’m here in the UK. I’m actually in pre production. I don’t have any money because I invested all the money, that I borrowed, to make Megalopolis. It’s basically gone. I think it’ll come back over 15 or 20 years, but I don’t have it now. So I don’t have any money. I have to do this film very cheap, which is what I’m doing.”

Megalopolis was a decades-long passion project for Coppola, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to baffled reviews. Despite some of its bolder creative choices, the movie failed to catch on with mainstream audiences at the box office. Megalopolis also received six Razzie nominations, winning for Worst Director and Worst Supporting Actor — though Coppola was thrilled about that.