Francis Ford Coppola Watch Sells for $10.8 Million at Auction

When you finance a long-gestating dream project yourself, that often comes with a need to raise money. If you’re Francis Ford Coppola and you’ve just spent nine figures making Megalopolis, that’s going to require a substantial amount of fundraising after the fact. Turns out Coppola is a watch collector, and one of the prizes of his collection just sold for a very respectable sum at auction.

An anonymous buyer purchased the FFC prototype for $10.8 million as part of Phillips’s New York Watch Auction: XIII, the centerpiece of an auction that brought in $43.5 million in total sales. According to the auction house’s announcement, the sale of Coppola’s watch was the highest amount Phillips has received for a watch sold in the U.S. since 2017, when another timepiece with a cinematic connection — Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona — sold for $17.8 million.

As Oren Hartov pointed out in our November article, the prototype watch that just sold for eight figures is a collaboration between the filmmaker and F.P. Journe. The winning bid ($10,775,000) set a new record for an F.P. Journe watch sold at auction. As Jacob Bernstein noted in The New York Times, this is the sixth-highest amount ever paid for a watch in an auction. It isn’t hard to see why: this is a singular timepiece, and the evocation of a human hand in the design is especially striking.

Three Watches We’re Eyeing During the December Auctions, Including an “Albino” Rolex

On the heels of some record-breaking sales, these are the lots to watch at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips

“Collectors responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to acquire Francis Ford Coppola’s personal timepieces, achieving stellar results for all seven watches consigned by the Hollywood icon,” said Phillips’s Paul Boutros and Isabella Proia in a joint statement. “From the record-breaking FFC Prototype, to the Chronomètre à Résonance ‘FFC’ that soared to $584,500, to the no reserve Breguet that sold for 15 times its low estimate, it is clear that the admiration for Mr. Coppola and his taste in watches cannot be overstated. We are honored to have been entrusted with his collection.”

Meet your guide

Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…