Veteran filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola has given up his lease on a private island in Belize after suffering financial troubles following the flop of his film Megalopolis.
The 2.5-acre island, named Coral Caye, is situated eight miles off the mainland behind the Belize Barrier Reef.
It had been leased by Coppola, 86, for nine years and formed part of his boutique hospitality brand, Family Coppola Hideaways. During his time there, he built two residences and a pier, complete with solar panels and water tanks, investing in the property’s self-sufficiency.
“Mr Coppola was very sad to see his lease come to an end,” Corcoran Group’s Peter McLean told Mansion Global, adding that Coppola visited every three to six months. “He treasured his time on this island paradise and it was a special place for him.”
The lease transfer comes as The Godfather director faces heavy financial losses from Megalopolis, his long-planned, self-funded film which reportedly cost around $120m (£91.2m) but earned only $14.4m (£10.9m) worldwide. A large part of its budget, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, came from the sale of two of his wineries.
The film, which stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf, is a futuristic fable that draws parallels between modern day America and the fall of Rome.
Critics were divided over the film when it was released in September 2024.
Coppola has acknowledged the strain, telling the Tetragrammaton podcast earlier this year in March: “I don’t have any money because I invested all the money that I borrowed to make Megalopolis. It’s basically gone. I think it’ll come back over 15 or 20 years, but I don’t have it now.”
A Guatemalan businessman has taken over the lease and plans to expand the property into a larger resort within the next year and a half. Coral Caye was first listed in 2022 for $2.19m (£1.6m).
In October 2025, The New York Times reported that Coppola, speaking from Rome, said he was preparing to sell seven luxury watches through auction house Phillips “to keep the ship afloat”.
Among the watches he put up was a 2014 FP Journe that he helped design and that retailed for around $1m, along with several Patek Philippe, Blancpain, IWC, and Breguet timepieces valued between $3,000 (£2,278) and $240,000 (£182,248).
Coppola has remained optimistic about Megalopolis, telling NYT that “many of my films earn out over time”, citing Apocalypse Now, which initially plunged him into debt but later grossed more than $150m (£113.9m).
In May this year, Coppola said he hadn’t approved a home release of the film because it was still in theatres, and he had seen the same thing play out during Apocalypse Now.
“After the election, people are selling out screenings of Megalopolis — the way it was intended to be seen. Being that it was so prophetic or prescient to say America is like Rome — it’s going to maybe lose its republic — now people are rushing to see it in theaters. We sold out three screenings in Boston recently, in Detroit, and people are really lining up,” he told GQ.
“It’s just like what happened with Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was a big flop, it got terrible reviews, everyone said it was the worst movie ever made. And yet people never stopped going to see it. The same thing is now happening with Megalopolis.”
In a three-star review for The Independent, Geoffrey McNab wrote: “Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded $120m epic, certainly isn’t another Godfather or Apocalypse Now, but it’s at least bursting with ideas.
“The filmmaker spent decades trying to get Megalopolis off the ground. What if it was no good? And what to make of the many claims of chaos on its set? Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric...
“Visually, Megalopolis is often dazzling. Skyscrapers are shown in golden-hued light, while the film’s futuristic cityscape rekindles memories of Fritz Lang’s silent era classic Metropolis, as well as those playfully kitsch fantasies that French film pioneer Georges Melies used to turn out in the early days of cinema.”
