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Francis Ford Coppola’s $100M Dollar Bet
- elil17 5y agoWhy the article doesn’t mention: the movie will have a star studded cast, including Zendaya
- dwighttk 5y agoI watch Groundhog Day every Feb 2nd. Not sure I need another film to watch regularly.
- Talanes 5y agoEven for Christmas movies, A Christmas Story managed to take that title from It's a Wonderful Life in my circles. Those TBS all-day repeats are great for something to have on in a chaotic house where nobody is sitting still long enough to just watch through a movie.
- nickpeterson 5y agoMy go to is Christmas Vacation, as a dad helping make Christmas ‘happen’, that movie rings truer every year.
- ipaddr 5y agoDie Hard has risen im popularity lately.
- mafro 5y agoDie Hard is my family's Christmas movie. Even now I live in Australia, and the weather outside is not frightful at Christmas.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoDie Hard, just before Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.
- BugWatch 5y agoIt's "V for Vendetta" (2005) in my case, obviously on the Fifth of November.
- xcambar 5y agoNot sure you need one, but what do you do with those 364 other days then?
- dwighttk 5y agoWatch movies for the first time, or rewatch whatever suits my fancy. Or don’t watch. :)
- jedberg 5y agoPalm Springs on November 9th. You won't be disappointed.
- randomsilence 5y agoIn a sense, it's the prequel to Megalopolis. We need to know who we want to be before we can discuss how society is supposed to be.
- avl999 5y agoI am shocked he has to put his own money into this movie. It must be really off the wall for a studio to not invest in that. Studios are generally willing to raise money for movies by big name directors even if they haven't had a hit recently (see how Terrence Malick keeps getting to make big expensive movies, most with a-list stars despite not having had a commercial or widespread critical hit since the late-90s).
- AmVess 5y agoSpielberg has said a few times that it is hard for him to raise money for projects. Other big names have said the same thing. Studios want superhero movies or reboots and nothing else.
- echelon 5y agoSuperhero movies are the current optima in (audience appetite, profit, time to delivery, box office saturation / crowding out competition). It makes business sense, it just sucks for those trying to do something different, as it sucks the money out of the system. Opportunity cost favors capes. Hollywood is going to change dramatically over the next few decades as more projects move to post production rendering pipelines and the entire film process gets upended. Maybe this will provide much needed air to those seeking to do new and unusual things.
- ipaddr 5y agoThe international market is the main reason. These type of movies play well globally and are easily understood compared to dialogue heavy / complex story / local knowledge required stories.
- cycomanic 5y agoI'd like to see some statistics for that. IIRC most of the big marvel/dc comic movies did significantly better in the US than outside. It sort of makes sense as well, those comic books were not as big for the generation that is 30+ now in those other countries. The too complex dialogue argument also doesn't really make sense considering that movies get translated in the biggest overseas markets.
- eigenvalue 5y agoIf you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend Coppola’s film Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s not as well known as some of his others, but it’s incredible. Funny and poignant at the same time.
- firasd 5y agoIt's definitely a bet... something I realized in the past few years is that expensive Sci-Fi movies (excluding superhero franchises) don't usually make their money back.
- stingraycharles 5y agoYou have some examples? I just checked Interstellar and The Martian ($145MM and $108MM budget respectively) but they were very much profitable.
- babyshake 5y agoJupiter Ascending. Reminiscence. Tenet. I don't think Ad Astra did that well.
- Invictus0 5y agoI didn't like Tenet either, but it was the first major movie released after the pandemic and had a very troubled rollout for that reason. Not really a fair example.
- firasd 5y ago2017 is when I first noticed this... Ghost in the Shell, Valerian, Blade Runner 2049
- ainiriand 5y agoBlade Runner 2049 made their money back, it is just it wasn't a big success.
- drexlspivey 5y agoThe movie budgets quoted in the various sites do not include the marketing budget. The rule of thumb is to double the quoted budget and compare with worldwide gross.
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- Hard_Space 5y agoGQ seem to have overcome every anti-autoplay setting and add-on that Firefox can throw at it.
- timmytokyo 5y agoI viewed the article with Firefox and uBlock Origin. No auto-play ads here.
- sexy_seedbox 5y agoNo issues at all with Kiwi Browser + uBlock Origin + Bypass Paywalls
- aphroz 5y agoHe seems to have bet his whole life and at the end he seems to have won. I wonder why he doesn't do a crowd funding, I am sure he would raise the money easily and not have producers on his back.
- telesilla 5y agoI agree. What a beautiful man and a beautiful piece of writing about him. I'd happily chip in, no reward needed.
- etempleton 5y agoHe is a multi-billionaire. He simply does not need to crowdfund. This is a big bet, but if it does not pay off it will not bankrupt him or in any way risk him or his family's fortune.
- atombender 5y agoCoppola isn't a multi-billionaire. His net worth by most estimates is around $300-400m. Much of that was built on successfully suing Warner Bros. in the 1990s for $80m, which he used to build out his vineyard, food, and resort businesses.
- mhb 5y agoThat's not what TFA suggests.
- kloch 5y ago> I wonder why he doesn't do a crowd funding, I am sure he would raise the money easily At first this seems like a non-starter because it's a for-profit film so soliciting donations might be a hard sell. If it were advertised as pre-sale where you are basically buying a copy of the film before it's made, it might work. Still, $120M is a lot of pre-sales and you would be on the hook for refunds if the film were never completed. Actual equity investors in motion pictures entitled to a share of the profits have to be "accredited", at least in the US. You can't solicit investments from the general public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor. You also wouldn't want a huge number of investors, that's a lot of paperwork.
- randomsilence 5y agoWe could as well skip the movie and start the debate right away. >What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life—a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. “On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it.” >>One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let's leap into the future, let's leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let's find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’ Is this a "French Connection" situation and it takes FF Coppola's soul to make it a tradition? HN already has all the infrastructure to establish the tradition of discussing this question. Is this a tradition worth establishing? And if so, what does it take besides making a submission?
- PostOnce 5y agoWell, a film can probably reach a wider audience than HN. It seems like he wants society to reconsider itself, in its many millions, rather than for just our relatively small group on this forum to reconsider society.
- selimthegrim 5y agoFrank Capra, and I say this as a Caltech alum, was kind of a shit after the 1950s as a person. I think Coppola can do better for a role model.
- dahdum 5y agoIt’s been 30 years since he saw commercial success with Bran Stoker’s Dracula, no one is lining up to invest given his more recent track record. Still, he pulled off Apocalypse Now under similar terms and $120m is enough to do a great movie with great talent. IIRC his script is from the early 80’s at the end of his golden age. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
- dudeinjapan 5y agoI just hope it's not a Megaflopolis
- eric4smith 5y agoLove all his movies. But... This sounds like a project a developer would do, that's just a bit too much. One that has too many features. One that said developer has been thinking of for the past 10 years. The passion project. And passion projects generally fail.
- hwers 5y agoA developer with an incredible track record and decades of experience.
- sfmike 5y agoWell if it does 50m back and he makes 10 million a year from his wine portfolio(probably more) in 5 years he'll get back to 0 on the 100 million so its a bet but it's not the end of the world. Also, at late life legacy matters most then money to accomplish what you want before the end of the biological clock.
- dav_Oz 5y ago>Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by…Gary?” Cary Fukunaga. Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they're going to justify their budget. And that's the good films, and the talented filmmakers. It is interesting but when I watch Denis Villeneuve last films I really ignore all this genre thing because I'm so at awe of his execution. Similarly, when I first watched Tarkovsky's Solaris I quickly lost track of the plot but was drawn to the uniquely crafted cinematography and hypnotized by the deliberate manipulation of pace; at the end I was watching a movie by itself instead of contrasting it with my reading experience beforehand. The same could be said about the seamless implementation of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into the Vietnam setting of "Apocalypse Now" [Arrival has imho a very noticeable weak plot, it is only when you read the short story "Story of your Life" that it fits nicely in. Nevertheless once you ignore that apparent flaw, it is a wonderful shot movie.] The "marvelisation" has gone so absurd that here you are in 2019 after dozens of franchises watching "Joker" (in parallel with another Joker version at the backdrop of Ledgers last peformance) which subversively utilized the marketing ploy into tricking the audience watching a deeply disburting indie-film about the chasms of our society depicted in a masterfully balanced unstable character drawing by an actor using nearly his whole skill set. Cervantes as a prisoner of his time quite successfully played with the readers expectations of "chivalry romance" (a popular franchise back then) to express himself artistically in a new way we now call a "novel". You laugh and cry at the same time when reading through the book, a comedy, tragedy, persiflage, psychoanlysis, slap-stick ... it really is a mess. Embrassing the mess is not something you can persuade "rational thinking" types in the movie industry making the decisions, so you trick 'em. Unfortunately nowadays you have to do a lot of lip-service. I don't know about Chloé Zhao but "The Rider" and "Nomadland" were great movies, I wonder what "Eternals" meant to her aside the recognition of entrusting her with a 200$ million budget.