Francis Ford Coppola says he is “thrilled” to accept his Razzie Award for his loaded box office bomb/longtime passion project Megalopolis.
The Razzie awards celebrate the year’s worst flops and duds in the film circuit, with Megalopolis garnering five nominations this year — including Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Director. Coppola ultimately won one Razzie for Worst Director (Madame Web took Worst Picture and Screenplay), with Jon Voight taking home the Worst Supporting Actor Razzie for his work in Megalopolis, Reagan, and more.
On Instagram, the director wrote a lengthy statement embracing the awards’ contrarian ethos. “I am thrilled to accept the Razzie award in so many important categories for @megalopolisfilm, and for the distinctive honor of being nominated as the worst director, worst screenplay, and worst picture at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking!,” he wrote.
He continued, railing against the film industry, critics, and the box office as a metric of success: “In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive 50 years from now.”
Coppola then shouted out one of his heroes, Jacques Tati, and seemingly compared the commercial failure (and eventually, critical success) of the French director’s Playtime to his own Megalopolis. “What an honor to stand alongside a great and courageous filmmaker like Jacques Tati who impoverished himself completely to make one of cinema’s most beloved failures, PLAYTIME! My sincere thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who joined me to make our work of art, MEGALOPOLIS, and let us remind ourselves us that box-office is only about money, and like war, stupidity and politics has no true place in our future.” See Coppola’s Instagram post below.
While time will tell if Megalopolis will indeed become a future classic, it’s still a bit of a tough sell. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money into the production (which has only earned $14 million at the box office), and that’s not even taking into account the various scandals that went into making this film. Coppola purposely cast “canceled” actors like Shia LeBoeuf, claiming he didn’t want the film to be a “woke Hollywood production” (whatever that means). There were also controversies with Coppola’s allegedly inappropriate and unprofessional behavior towards extras on set.
Then, Lionsgate used a bevy of fake, AI-generated quotes in the Megalopolis trailer that positioned legendary film critics as longtime Coppola haters; Lionsgate then quickly pulled the trailer and apologized for for “screwing up.” Now, with Coppola embracing his Razzie win, he finally gets to be the critically maligned underdog figure that he so desperately wanted Megalopolis to capitalize on.
Also garnering several Razzie nominations this year were Madame Web, Joker: Folie a Deux, Reagan, and Borderlands, who similarly embraced the bad press as its own marketing tool. Madame Web and the Jerry Seinfeld-starring Unfrosted won big at the 2025 ceremony, with Joker: Folie a Deux also picking up two Razzie wins.
Revisit our original review of Megalopolis, which we described as “a cautionary tale.”
Content shared from consequence.net.