Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing epic Big city will finally hit theaters in September, with a new trailer for the film that divided critics at film festivals when it debuted earlier this year.
The trailer goes on the offensive and fights back against the many bad reviews after the Cannes Film Festival. It begins with a look back at the director’s career and similarly misguided critical assessments of Coppola’s previous masterpieces such as The Godfather (“A sloppy, complacent film,” Village Voice said at the time of publication), Apocalypse now (“A spectacular failure,” said one critic of the now classic war film) and Dracula (“A beautiful mess”).
“A filmmaker always ahead of his time,” adds Laurence Fishburne’s voiceover of Coppola’s legacy. After explaining that film critics are sometimes wrong, the trailer begins with 90 seconds of actual Big city Film material.
“Big city is a Roman epic set in an imaginary modern America,” said the synopsis from film distributor Lionsgate Movies.
“The city of New Rome needs to change, leading to conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who wants to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opponent, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains loyal to a regressive status quo and upholds greed, special interests and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties and forces her to explore what she believes humanity truly deserves.”
Rolling Stone was one of the publications that Big city a positive review after its debut at Cannes. “It’s a conceptual dream project that the filmmaker has been chasing for nearly half his life, and had he made and released it sometime in the early 21st century, it would have felt unique. In 2024, this personal, profound, perversely optimistic film about the slow march toward Utopia Now, on a self-financed $120 million budget, feels like a damn unicorn,” wrote David Fear.
“It feels like a final declaration of intent, a summary of the dreams of a whole life. And what is cinema other than a screen for dreamers? Whether Big city Whether the movie makes a billion dollars or nothing is beside the point. As long as there are people who love movies that are about real things and that deal with the last 6,000 years of human civilization, there is an audience for it.”
Big city will be in theaters on September 27th.
