Will Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’ sink or swim?
Cinema buffs around the world surely rejoiced when they found out that Paul Thomas Anderson will be releasing a new movie later this year with none other than Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading role. The filmmaker has a habit of squeezing the greatest performances imaginable from his actors, as demonstrated by his history of working with acclaimed stars like Daniel Day-Lewis and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, so his upcoming collaboration with DiCaprio is hotly anticipated.
But will One Battle After Another be a triumph? The film also stars Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, and Regina Hall, with Anderson’s faithful collaborator Jonny Greenwood returning on score duties. With a strong cast, a soundtrack that is guaranteed to be great, and even a Thomas Pynchon novel as inspiration (this time around, Anderson has looked to Vineland), the film has all the hallmarks of a solid PTA production. But, interestingly, it has been made on a budget far greater than what he earned with his highest-grossing movie.
In 2007, Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was released to high acclaim, becoming heralded as one of the greatest movies of the 2000s. It grossed $76million, which is a lot less compared to many of his contemporaries, like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino. However, Anderson has always teetered on the fine line between commercial accessibility and cinematic experimentation. He is perhaps one of the most arthouse-adjacent filmmakers of his stature—even if his films are all relatively easy to follow—but as a result, he tends to gross a lot less than you might expect.
Inherent Vice was made on a budget of $20m and only made back $14m, while his most recent effort, the divisive Licorice Pizza, lost $7m at the box office, having been made on a larger $40m budget. So, is Anderson going to find unprecedented commercial success with One Battle After Another? It has reportedly been made with a whopping $140m, with Warner Bros’ Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy giving the project the green light, despite the studio’s consistent string of recent financial failures.
It is possible that Anderson will deliver an unprecedented box office smash with DiCaprio leading the movie, further aided by the fact that it falls into the action genre, which currently feels more popular than ever. The star is one of the most profitable in Hollywood, attracting both cinephiles and casual movie fans to his projects, so there’s a chance that many non-PTA-obsessed cinema-goers might buy a ticket based on DiCaprio’s involvement alone.
The movie is set to follow a group of former revolutionaries as they reunite when one of their children is endangered, which feels like a much more commercial endeavour for Anderson than we’re used to. While capitalist greed turned tragic in There Will Be Blood, love turned poisonous in Phantom Thread, and Dirk Diggler’s life turned incredibly X-rated in Boogie Nights, it’ll be interesting to see the kinds of wider themes Anderson will explore from within the confines of an action-revenge film.
One Battle After Another is also slated to be a dark comedy, something the director is known to do well, so it seems to have real promise to succeed with critics. The film is set for release on September 26th, 2025, so only time will tell whether it’ll sink or swim, but with Anderson’s previous track record, regardless of whether the movie is good, it’ll be surprising if it generates over $100m at the box office.
