Francis Ford Coppola had high hopes for his pet film project Megalopolis, which had an estimated budget between $120-136million. Unfortunately, the film bombed both with the critics and at the box office, bringing in only $14.4million. Now, to somehow offset the losses, Coppola is auctioning off a custom $1 million watch.
This watch is one of the seven timepieces that are to be sold off in an auction set to take place on December 6 and 7, 2025, at the New York City auction house Phillips. It is the key piece up for auction in the so-called “Coppola Collection” is the F.P. Journe FCC Prototype, which Coppola made with famed watchmaker Francis-Paul Journe. It features a “black-treated titanium hand,” which was developed over the span of nearly a decade’s worth of conversations between Journe/his staff and Coppola.
The hand was inspired by a 16th-century prosthetic crafted by French physician Ambroise Paré, and tells the time via “the fingers and thumb extending or retracting in a set of sequences that indicate different hours.”
The minutes are “determined by a white rotating ring around the perimeter.” It’s one of only three versions ever made by Journe, with the last watch selling at a 2021 charity auction for 4.5million Swiss francs (£4.2million).
Another standout piece in the collection is the Chronomètre à Résonance, which was gifted to Coppola by his late wife Eleanor Coppola. The timepiece is accompanied by “an advertisement for the Résonance, which Francis Ford Coppola saved and was later found by his wife, leading to the gift.” That watch is set to be auctioned for between $120,000 and $240,000.
