Following the press conference unveiling the Cannes lineup, festival director Thierry Fremaux addressed a few hot topics, including Francis Ford Coppola’s 135-minute epic “Megalopolis,” which doesn’t yet have a distribution deal.
While “Megalopolis,” Coppola’s self-produced $120 million opus starring Adam Driver, has been selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, it doesn’t have a distribution deal in France. In theory, that’s not an issue as there are “quite a lot of films in the official section without any distribution,” as Fremaux tells Variety. But in the case of “Megalopolis,” it may be a ticking bomb.
If “Megalopolis” does get sold to a streamer with no theatrical plans for France, it will spark uproar on the Croisette and within local exhibitors. Most importantly, it will clash with Cannes’ infamous rule which requires every film in competition to have French theatrical distribution. That strict guideline was first established by the board of the Cannes Film Festival in the wake of a widespread scandal that stemmed from the programming of two Netflix films, Bong Joon Ho’s “Okja” and Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories,” in competition in 2017. Since then, Netflix has not returned to Cannes and has been presenting its films at the Venice Film Festival.
At this point, most major independent distributors in France have told Variety that they haven’t seen the film or been in touch with Coppola’s lawyer, Barry Hirsch, who hosted an Imax screening for buyers a couple weeks ago and is actively chasing a deal, potentially with a studio or streamer. Of course, if it’s sold to Apple or Amazon, the movie could still have a theatrical distribution in France — similar to Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which was an Apple movie and released in theaters by Paramount. Netflix, on the other hand, doesn’t release its films in French theaters due to the local windowing rules that require the service to wait 15 months after a theatrical rollout to make a film available to its subscribers.
Addressing the pending distribution plans for “Megalopolis,” Fremaux said that Coppola is “an artist.” “He made his film with his own money. Then he finished this film. He showed it to us and to some other people in the U.S., and he’s thinking about the strategy of the film,” he said. “We’ll see. But of course, I’m not the one who is able to talk about that.”
Asked about the eventuality of a sale to a streamer such as Netflix which would exclude a release in French cinemas, Fremaux responded with a smile, “Maybe it will be something quite unexpected. And we’ll see. We love improvisation!”
Fremaux also talked about the number of female directors in competition, which dropped to four this year from last year’s seven. He said Cannes was at the “end of the chain” and was an “echo of world cinema.”
“We need half a century to take the full measure of a trend, but we can say that the trend — even if there are only four directors in competition — is that there are more and more female directors globally,” he said, adding that the committee has also started taking gender into consideration throughout the selection process. He also revealed Cannes will soon publish a study of female directors’ representation at the festival.
“There are proportionally many more female directors at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Official Selection, than there are in the world,” he said.
