Francis Ford Coppola On Motion Picture Industry: “Streaming Is What We Use To Call Home Video”, But Major Studios May Become Extinct – Cannes

As Megalopolis continues to seek a U.S. distribution deal, its writer-director Francis Ford Coppola was asked to comment on the state of the film industry and whether the movie’s best destination is on streaming.

“Streaming is what we use to call home video,” was the director’s first response to the query, after the question was posed Friday at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, a day after the pic’s world premiere screening.

Coppola then added that his hope is his dystopian epic finds a home in “large theater with 600 to 700 people.”

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“I feel the film industry is about people getting hired to meet debt obligations — their job isn’t to make good movies, but to pay their debt,” he said.

“These new companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — they have plenty of money. But the studios that we know for so long, may not be here in the future,” Coppola mused.

Commenting today the risk he took with his 40-year-in-the-making, $120 million-budgeted production, Coppola reflected on rolling the dice investing in his Napa and Sonoma wineries. He took out a loan for $20 million in the 1980s and “built a winery like Tivoli Gardens with swimming pools, a place where the kids would go, then grandparents. .. I created a place that now every winery tries to duplicate. I took the money from that, and I put the risk from that [into Megalopolis].”

Coppola emphasized that Megalopolis will leave him with “no problems” financially and that his offspring, including his children Sophia and Roman and their children, “have wonderful careers without a fortune.”

Megalopolis so far has secured distribution in five European countries as well as a limited Imax run. Dating for the film lies in whoever snaps up domestic rights; Coppola will sell streaming and TV rights apart from theatrical.

RELATED: Global ‘Megalopolis’ Imax Release Will Be Limited, With Date Contingent On U.S. Distribution, Though Late September Eyed

Megalopolis is billed as a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves. The pic is packed with an all-star casting including Driver, Esposito, Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney and Dustin Hoffman.

Megalopolis received a seven-minute ovation in its Cannes world premiere Thursday night, which itself was preceded by a three-minute ovation for Coppola, a two-time winner of the festival’s Palme d’Or, as he entered the Grand Theatre Lumiere before the screening.

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