Francis Ford Coppola Sells Luxury Watches for Millions Following Losses From ‘Megalopolis’
The filmmaker’s custom F.P. Journe watch, which he helped design in 2014, brought in nearly $11 million at auction
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It took 11 minutes of bidding for Francis Ford Coppola’s custom watch to sell for nearly $11 million.
The one-of-a-kind F.P. Journe watch, which Coppola helped design, sold to an anonymous phone bidder for $10.8 million including fees at Phillips’ New York auction. It became the sixth-most-expensive watch to sell at auction—and the only one on that list that wasn’t made by Patek Philippe or Rolex, the New York Times’ Jacob Bernstein reports.
“The importance of this watch, which represents the ultimate creative collaboration between two of the greatest minds in cinematic and horological history, cannot be overstated,” Paul Boutros, deputy chairman and head of watches for the Americas at Phillips, tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Lexi Carson.
Known as the FFC, the watch was designed by Coppola and F.P. Journe, a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer, in 2014. The custom timepiece features a gloved hand with fingers that change poses depending on the hour, and an openwork design, meaning that the mechanical inner workings of the watch are visible. Only a few FFC watches exist, including a prototype that sold in 2021 for nearly $5 million.
Founded in 1999 by watchmaker François-Paul Journe, the award-winning Geneva-based F.P. Journe has become one of the world’s most sought-after luxury watch brands.
“It’s an extraordinary price,” Andrew Shear, a secondary market dealer, tells the Times of the FFC sale. “But the Journe market is on fire.”
Coppola, who directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, is himself a fan of Journe’s work. “I think his watches are little works of art,” he told Hodinkee’s Logan Baker in 2021. “I’ve always had an admiration for art and scientific ingenuity. F.P. Journe watches seem to me to be masterpieces of design and engineering.”
Quick fact: How much money did The Godfather make?
During its original release in 1972, the film grossed around $250 million worldwide.
It was Coppola’s idea to create a timepiece that told time with a single hand. “I absolutely did not think it was a particularly original idea," the filmmaker told Hodinkee. But, he added, Journe “did some research on it and he couldn't find a reference to any timepiece using a single hand.”
The latest FFC sale took place a little over a year after the theatrical release of Megalopolis, the retrofuturist science-fiction drama written, directed and financed by Coppola himself. The $120 million project had been 40 years in the making and had undergone hundreds of rewrites, as Variety’s Zack Sharf reported in 2024. The film was a critical and box office disappointment, grossing $14.4 million—just a sliver of its budget.
Self-funding Megalopolis left Coppola strapped for cash, he said in March on “Tetragrammaton,” music producer Rick Rubin’s podcast. In October, he told the Times that he would be auctioning off several watches to “keep the ship afloat.”
Several other Coppola-owned watches sold at the Phillips auction, including another F.P. Journe watch, making the director a total of around $11.7 million, per the San Francisco Chronicle’s G. Allen Johnson.