The bad news for Francis Ford Coppola is that he made Megalopolis at exactly the wrong time. A long, pretentious, semi-coherent arthouse film about progress through architecture, starring Jon Voight’s erection and a man who can stop time for no apparent reason, was probably always going to struggle to make money.
But to make it for over $100m of his own money and release it in 2024, in an age where the bulk of the public have largely given up on visiting the cinema, was disastrous. Its box office gross, in the end, was just $14.4m. For comparison, that puts it roughly in line with the gross of a French language biopic about Charles Aznavour released the same year. But that film cost four times less, didn’t open in any English-speaking countries and wasn’t about the proposed construction of a glowing golden city.
In other words, Francis Ford Coppola is broke. But the good news is that this is an excellent time to be an obscenely wealthy watch collector. To shore up his funds a little, Coppola is holding what amounts to a hugely upmarket yard sale, in which he will sell one of his million-dollar watches.
According to the New York Times, in December Coppola will auction off a self-designed timepiece made by FP Journe. The watch, called the FFC, doesn’t have hands to represent hours and minutes. Instead, the time is told via an armoured human hand in the middle of the face, the fingers of which move into various configurations depending on the time of day. Which is to say that the watch literally attempts to reinvent the way we tell time, even though nobody had a problem with the way we already did it, which does seem like a fairly Coppolaesque thing to want to do.
Luckily for Coppola the watch is wildly expensive. A prototype sold at auction in 2021 for close to $3m, more than 10 times over its estimate. And while this doesn’t have the same cachet – unlike the prototype, it didn’t take eight years to make – it is still expected to reach seven figures.
Upping the value is the fact that buyers won’t just be purchasing an insanely intricate timepiece, they’re also buying Francis Ford Coppola’s state of mind. When David Lynch’s estate auctioned off his belongings earlier this year, one of the main draws was his espresso machine, since his love of coffee was legendary. Similarly, what sort of multimillionaire Coppola fan would be able to turn down the opportunity to own a device that does a very simple thing in a punishingly complicated way? In that regard it’s less a watch and more the physical manifestation of Coppola’s entire reason to be.
But let’s retain some perspective here. The FFC might be a once-in-a-lifetime watch that is completely out of the financial bounds of the majority of people. It is likely to become the most cherished possession of whoever buys it. However, it’s important to remember that Megalopolis was such an almighty boondoggle that the watch – this million-dollar, boundary-pushing artwork that took eight years to painstakingly manufacture – will only pay for about 82 seconds of its runtime.
Of course, Francis Ford Coppola has other ways to make some of the money back. He’s selling some of his other watches, which range from $3,000 to $240,000 in value. He has been touring Megalopolis, accompanied by a talk called How to Change Our Future, with tickets going for $200 a pop. And there is also Megadoc, the StudioCanal-distributed documentary about the making of Megalopolis, which has already been reviewed far more favourably than the film itself.
But, really, none of this matters. Francis Ford Coppola isn’t ever going to make all his Megalopolis money back, but we’re talking about a man who has spent his entire life making and losing fortunes over and over again. He has never been afraid to plough his money into a madcap artistic stream that never quite pays off, and he has always ended up being OK. The man is now 86 years old. If Megalopolis proves to be his final film, then at least he blew his money doing something that only he could have done. And if a billionaire ends up getting an unfathomable watch out of it, more the better.
