Coppola’s Last Circus: How an 85-Year-Old Auteur Mortgaged Napa to Teach the World About Ruins

CANNES, FRANCE—Somewhere between the rosé-soaked yacht parties and the grimy back-alley screenings, Francis Ford Coppola has once again wandered into the international spotlight like a sleep-deprived oracle who’s misplaced his wallet. The 85-year-old director arrived on the Croisette this May to hawk Megalopolis, a self-funded fever dream he’s been nursing since the Reagan administration—roughly the last time anyone believed an American auteur could lecture the planet on utopia without being laughed off the continent.

Europe, accustomed to treating US filmmakers as either endangered poets or capitalist rodeo clowns, greeted him with that particular continental blend of reverence and schadenfreude. Italian critics hailed the project as “a Caesar-haunted hallucination,” which is Mediterranean code for “we’re not sure it makes sense, but it flatters our ruins.” Meanwhile, German financiers—still atoning for Deutsche Bank’s last adventure in American subprime—quietly booked exit rows in case the film’s $120 million budget spontaneously combusted over the Mediterranean.

Coppola’s circus matters beyond the bubble of celluloid fetishists. In an era when streaming giants beam algorithmic oatmeal into 190 countries simultaneously, the stubborn spectacle of one geriatric dreamer maxing out his vineyard to build cardboard Rome feels almost geopolitical. It’s a throwback to the age when Hollywood exports shaped global fantasies—before Beijing’s censors clipped Marvel’s wings and Seoul’s squid games taught the world to murder for Wi-Fi. Watching a septuagenarian mortgage his Napa château to lecture humanity on the decline of republics is, depending on your latitude, either a quaint tribute to American individualism or a cautionary tale about late-stage hubris served with a side of cabernet.

Across the developing world, the saga lands differently. In Lagos traffic jams, bootleg disc vendors already retitle the film “Mr. Vinegar Builds Rome” and move units for the equivalent of two mangoes. Mumbai film students dissect Coppola’s balance sheets in MBA seminars as proof that even gods file for overdraft protection. And in Buenos Aires, where inflation outruns plot, directors nod sympathetically: any nation that’s defaulted on its own future recognizes a man betting his last acre on an impossible epic.

The international press, starved of glamorous collapse since the UK imploded its own economy for sport, lapped up every eccentric detail: the live actors planted in the premiere audience, the Q&A where Coppola quoted Plutarch to a room itching for TikTok length. French journalists compared him to a deposed monarch reciting poetry in exile; British tabloids preferred “skint wino with a Roman complex.” Both miss the punchline: in 2024, the line between emperor and entertainer is drawn in disappearing ink, and the Colosseum is now a co-working space.

What lingers is the spectacle of an American legend bartering earthly pleasures for metaphysical cityscapes while the actual cities outside the Palais—Nice, Antibes, Cannes itself—grapple with pension protests, climate floods, and Russian oligarchs laundering reputations between premieres. Coppola insists Megalopolis asks whether humanity will build the future or recycle its ruins. Viewers exiting midnight screenings seemed better positioned to answer: they stepped over garbage bags piled like tiny battlements, evidence that municipal unions strike even during utopian unveilings.

Whether the film recoupes its vineyard collateral or joins Waterworld in the pantheon of pricey shipwrecks is, frankly, a first-world anxiety. The broader significance is simpler: an old man with an American passport still believes the globe will pay to watch him imagine civilization; the globe, in turn, uses him to confirm whatever stereotype it needs—decline, ingenuity, megalomania, charm. Both parties will walk away vaguely unsatisfied, which is the most honest transaction Cannes has facilitated in years. Somewhere, between the applause and the creditors, Francis Ford Coppola has accidentally delivered the perfect allegory for the 21st century: a dazzling ruin nobody can quite afford, screening nightly until the money—or the planet—runs out.