Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
The story of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is not, it turns out, over. The legendary director has announced (per The Guardian) that he’s moving forward with a plan to launch a graphic novel interpretation of his decades-in-the-making film, presumably because graphic novels don’t cost as much to make as movies, which turn out to be pretty dang expensive! (Coppola famously partially self-funded Megalopolis, which had a budget in the $130 million range. Getting too bogged down in box office realities is, obviously, reductive to art, but he, uh, definitely didn’t make that money back after the movie finished its fairly brief, critically confused theatrical run.) Graphic novels are typically cheaper, on account of how you can just draw the thing, whether it’s a fantastical futuristic city scape, or an Adam Driver saying “go back to the cluuuub” in that one scene we’ve watched about a billion times, which suggests that Coppola does have some sense of economic scale when it comes to this story.
Titled (deep breath) Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: An Original Graphic Novel, the book is being written by Chris Ryall, former president of IDW Publishing, which is well known for its comics adapting various pop culture properties. (Ryall has personally written more than a dozen such books, including a book called Kiss Kids that is, indeed, about child versions of the members of Kiss. Reviews are pretty good!) ) Artist Jacob Phillips (That Texas Blood) will handle the visuals, while Abrams ComicsArt will publish. (Oddly, the book was originally supposed to come out at Ryall’s Syzygy Publishing imprint, which is part of Image Comics; it’s not clear when it migrated over to Abrams.) Coppola said in a statement this week that his intent was to be deliberately hands-off with Ryall’s take on the film’s story, saying
I was pleased to put the idea of a graphic novel in the competent hands of Chris Ryall with the idea that, although it was inspired by my film Megalopolis, it didn’t necessarily have to be limited by it. I hoped the graphic novel would take its own flight, with its own artists and writer so that it would be a sibling of the film, rather than just an echo… It confirms my feeling that art can never be constrained, but rather always a parallel expression, and part of the bounty we can make available to our patrons, audiences and readers.
Ryall, for his part, expressed his hope that the book “both honours and expands the world of the original film.” FFCM:AOGN (pronounced “ffffcmaogn!” at least, if you ask us) is set for an October 2025 release date.
This isn’t the only tie-in Coppola has mused about for the film, which he spent years upon years developing: In 2023, he hinted that a novelization of the film had previously been penned by author Colleen McCullough, despite her having been dead for eight full years at the time he made the statement.
