Megalopolis

Lore & Background

The term megalopolis derives from the Greek word megalo-polis, meaning 'big city,' and was originally given as an aspirational name to the settlement of Megalopolis in Arcadia, southern Greece, founded during the 4th century BC. (the Northeast megalopolis).

Reader's Guide

The megalopolis concept, following Gottmann's work, refers to two or more roughly adjacent metropolitan areas that, through commonality of systems—transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience a blurring of boundaries, such that their perception as a continuous urban area is of value for coordinating policy at an expanded scale. Simply put, a megalopolis is a clustered network of big cities. Gottmann defined its population as 25 million, while Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis at about 10 million. In China, the official term is 'city cluster' (城市群), originally coined by Yao Shimou, defined as an area where cities are relatively densely distributed.

Did You Know?

• The term megalopolis was originally the aspirational name of a settlement in Arcadia, Greece, founded in the 4th century BC.
• Jean Gottmann applied the term to the Northeast megalopolis from Boston to Washington, D.C.
• Gottmann described the Northeast megalopolis as having about 25 million people at the time, but did not establish a fixed population threshold; Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis at about 10 million.
• In China, the official term for megalopolis is 'city cluster' (城市群), popularized by geographers such as Song Jiatai in the 1980s, with earlier usage existing.

A Decade-Long Obsession

Disillusioned by the very industry he had helped define, Coppola ultimately walked away from the studio model entirely.

A Troubled Shoot

The production of Megalopolis carried the hallmarks of several other Coppola films: a creative process that was as turbulent as it was ambitious. The director reassembled a familiar constellation of collaborators, bringing back actors Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, James Remar, Talia Shire, and D. B. Sweeney, along with cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr., composer Osvaldo Golijov, and his son Roman Coppola in the role of second-unit director. On set, Coppola adopted an experimental approach that encouraged his cast to improvise and even write certain scenes during the shoot, while he himself continued to inject last-minute changes into the script. This fluid, improvisational method, however, came at a cost. Members of the art department and the visual effects team, among others, either left the production or were dismissed. The result was a film born from a kind of controlled chaos, where the director's vision was realized in real time rather than through a locked screenplay, and where the friction between creative freedom and production logistics left visible scars on the final product.

Cannes to the Box Office

The road to that release was anything but smooth. Coppola could not secure a studio willing to both reimburse his production costs and fund a large-scale marketing campaign, so he paid for the advertising out of pocket. A promotional trailer was pulled after it was discovered to contain fabricated pull quotes, and Coppola filed a libel suit against trade publication Variety following its publication of allegations of sexual misconduct on set. When the film finally reached audiences, it polarized critics sharply. Some praised its ambition, originality, and visual style; others found it chaotic and uneven, with deep divisions over the quality of the acting and the coherence of the story.

New Rome and the Weight of Empire

Set in an alternate twenty-first-century New York City reimagined as New Rome, the film transposes the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC onto a city dominated by patrician families who profess a strict moral code while indulging in forbidden pleasures, leaving ordinary citizens in poverty. At the center is Cesar Catilina, a Nobel Prize-winning architect who has invented a revolutionary building material called Megalon and possesses the secret ability to stop time. Despite his worldly success, he is haunted by alcoholism and the disappearance of his wife, for whose murder he was once prosecuted by the city's District Attorney, Franklyn Cicero. Now the corrupt Mayor, Cicero opposes Cesar's grand vision of building a utopian community called Megalopolis, preferring instead to generate immediate tax revenue through a casino. Their ideological clash mirrors the broader tension between the decay of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, with secondary figures like the populist-turned-fascist Pulcher and the world's wealthiest man, Hamilton Crassus III, reinforcing the film's themes of power, corruption, and the seductive pull of demagoguery.