Francis Ford Coppola’s Cannes Entry ‘Megalopolis’ to Get Global Imax Release
Entertainment

Francis Ford Coppola’s Cannes Entry ‘Megalopolis’ to Get Global Imax Release

Imax is going big, mega actually, unveiling on Thursday that Francis Ford Coppola’s highly anticipated Megalopolis, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday evening, will get a global Imax release.

“The film is going to get an Imax release,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond told the press during a Thursday event in Cannes about Megalopolis. “One of the things that we pride ourselves on is being filmmaker-friendly. So we’ve committed to Francis to do a global Imax release.”

Gelford said that he met with Coppola in Cannes and that Imax will probably wait to see who will distribute the film in the U.S. and when before dating its Imax release. The film has already sold to multiple international territories.

On Monday, the director released the first teaser trailer to his epic, self-funded passion project, showcasing more of the scale and ambition of the project, with the large ensemble cast, dynamic shots of a utopian society and protests.

The movie is a Roman epic set in an imagined modern America, according to early descriptions. Adam Driver leads Megalopolis, and the film’s cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney and Dustin Hoffman.

Coppola first began writing Megalopolis in 1983, and the film reportedly cost $120 million to make, which was funded in part by the sale of a significant portion of the director’s wine empire. He hosted a screening of the project at the end of March for potential buyers, with Universal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Sony’s Tom Rothman all attending. However, distribution experts have highlighted challenges for positioning the movie.