While facilitating questions from fans through his Instagram story on Friday, acclaimed filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola admitted that he has yet to roll out for “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer.” Nevertheless, he called the box office success of both blockbusters a “victory for Cinema” — with a capital “C.”
“I have yet to see them, but the fact that people are filling big theaters to see them and that they are neither ‘sequels’ nor ‘prequels’… no number attached to them meaning they are true one-off’s is victory for Cinema,” he answered.
“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” turned a doll and the atomic bomb into the fourth-biggest weekend in box office history, collectively bringing in over $200 million during their simultaneous opening frames. Both films are holding strong this weekend too, maintaining the top two slots on domestic charts.
While he did helm a film trilogy of his own, the “Godfather” director hasn’t been shy about his problems with the whole sequels-prequels thing. In 2019, he spoke out in support of Martin Scorsese’s controversial comments regarding Marvel films, when he said those cinematic universe entries weren’t “real cinema.”
“Martin was being kind when he said it wasn’t cinema,” Coppola said during a press conference. “He didn’t say it was despicable, which is what I say.”
“There used to be studio films,” he added in a later interview with GQ. “Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different.”
But Coppola’s worry over the future of cinema seems to be quelled a bit by the success of July’s marquee pair.
Also on Instagram, a user asked Coppola where he sees the state of movies in 10 years. The director responded, “My hunch is that we’re on the verge of a golden age wonderfully illuminating cinema seen in large theaters.”
As he moves back into filmmaking himself, Coppola can only hope that movie theaters are good and ready to welcome his Adam Driver-led passion project “Megalopolis,” which is expected to debut next year.
