2024 was a strange year for movies, from the Wicked juggernaut to the strange case of Emilia Perez. But there was nothing quite like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a self-funded dystopian fever dream apparently decades in the making. It starred Adam Driver as a self-obsessed architect with the ability to stop time, but that’s only scratching the surface of a tale that featured a character named Wow Platinum and a moment that necessitated a live actor in the theater.
Despite all the hype, reviews were thoroughly mixed, and Megalopolis’ final box office numbers placed it firmly in flop territory. But the story is somehow not over yet.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Megalopolis will be adapted into a graphic novel from Abrams ComicArts called Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis: An Original Graphic Novel. The book, currently slated for an October 2025 release, will be written by Chris Ryall and illustrated by Jacob Phillips.
The comic version of the story won’t just be a translation from screen to page. “I was pleased to put the idea of a graphic novel in the competent hands of Chris Ryall with the idea that, although it was inspired by my film Megalopolis, it didn’t necessarily have to be limited by it,” Coppola said in a statement. “I hoped the graphic novel would take its own flight, with its own artists and writer so that it would be a sibling of the film, rather than just an echo.”
But what does a sibling to 2024’s wildest movie even look like? Will it be another story set in the same universe, the same story with new supplementary material, or maybe even the same story with an alternate ending? With Megalopolis, anything is on the table.
We may never see another movie quite like it, and that’s probably for the best, but at least its odd story will continue in another, much cheaper medium. It could be legitimately fascinating to see what other creators do with this universe, as long as there are no more random soliloquies from Hamlet or AI-generated critic blurbs.
