Five months after “Sinners” became Hollywood’s highest grossing live action original film in 15 years, Warner Bros. is back again in their campaign to bring tentpole-budget, auteur-driven movies to theaters with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.”
With 11 Oscar nominations and the distinction of being the only filmmaker to win director awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals, Anderson’s three-decade career has elevated him to cult status among cinephiles and widespread acclaim and respect among his peers. But “One Battle After Another,” his tenth film, will be his first with a wide release.
To date, the highest screen count an Anderson film has ever received is 1,977, belonging to the film often regarded as his magnum opus: Paramount/Miramax’s “There Will Be Blood.” That Daniel Day-Lewis drama is also the highest grossing of his career with $40.2 million domestic and $77 million worldwide in 2007.
But here is “One Battle After Another,” getting a release on 3,500 screens worldwide including Imax, Imax 70mm and four select theaters screening the film in VistaVision.
With a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn, as well as plenty of action scenes involving cars, guns and helicopters, this film is also Anderson’s most expensive with a production spend reported to be at least $130 million. But projections have the film earning a domestic opening weekend in the $20 million range.
It’s a grim theatrical outlook, but everything about “One Battle After Another” is right in line with the strategy developed by Warner Bros. under studio chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who at the end of March were facing hot seat rumors. Since then, the only thing that’s been hot is Warner’s box office numbers, as the studio became the first in history to score seven straight $40 million-plus domestic opening weekends with films ranging from Legendary’s “A Minecraft Movie” to DC’s “Superman,” not to mention a trio of New Line horror films that have quietly become the connective tissue between Warner’s big tentpoles.
But perhaps the biggest win for Warner and its film co-chairs is Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a film that raised a lot of C-suit eyebrows when De Luca and Abdy agreed to return the rights of the film to the “Black Panther” director in 25 years as part of a very creative-friendly deal.
The result: a $366 million global box office total that includes $278.5 million from the U.S./Canada, the highest for an original live action film since “Inception” — another Warner film — in 2010. “Sinners” is also set for an Imax re-release next month in time for Halloween, and could continue to be a major streaming asset for Warner as it is regarded by awards prognosticators as a lock to be a major Oscar contender.
And guess what: critics are loving “One Battle After Another” as much as they loved “Sinners.” With a staggering 98% Rotten Tomatoes score, the film is earning comparisons to “There Will Be Blood” as one of Anderson’s best, balancing crowd-pleasing action and intensity with a heartfelt father-daughter story and timely political themes about a society on the brink.
Now the question is whether “One Battle After Another” can draw in the masses the way “Sinners” did, and without the advantage of having a widely popular filmmaker behind one of the biggest superhero films ever made.
Of course, Paul Thomas Anderson does have a loyal following. His last film, “Licorice Pizza,” sold out dozens of screenings in New York and Los Angeles during its platform release on Thanksgiving weekend in 2021, and dozens of VistaVision screenings for “One Battle” in four theaters in Los Angeles, New York, Boston and London have already sold out.
But Anderson’s arthouse popularity isn’t the same as Coogler, who made “Sinners” after making a name for himself with “Creed” and two “Black Panther” films. By building his name through franchise blockbusters, Coogler cultivated a loyal audience similar to post-“Dark Knight” Christopher Nolan that followed him to his original work.
This allowed Warner Bros. to keep much of the plot details for “Sinners” under wraps and instead focus the marketing around Coogler and his star, Michael B. Jordan. Perhaps the most effective pre-release piece of marketing for “Sinners” was a viral video in which Coogler explained the difference between the various film formats “Sinners” would be presented in. Audiences responded to his passion and treated “Sinners” like a can’t-miss theatrical event.
With Anderson’s use of VistaVision — a long dormant format thrust back into the public eye thanks to last year’s Oscar-winning drama “The Brutalist” — being a prominent part of the marketing for “One Battle,” Warner Bros. is clearly trying to use early buzz from Anderson’s devotees combined with the aura of special formats like Imax 70mm to sell this film as a cinematic event.
But unlike “Sinners,” “One Battle” can’t turn to plot-light marketing. At CinemaCon back in April, several movie theater owners told TheWrap that they were very confused by Warner’s preview of the film, saying that it didn’t properly convey the film’s plot in lieu of a context-free scene in which DiCaprio’s character, a washed up ex-revolutionary named Bob, has a panicked phone call.
As the public campaign for “One Battle” has picked up, Warner has led with a trailer that puts the film’s premise front and center, as Bob scrambles to rescue his daughter after a foe from his revolutionary past comes back and kidnaps her.
While that trailer has played in front of recent Warner hits like “Weapons,” awareness and interest among audiences remains lukewarm. According to audience tracking data from Greenlight Analytics, “One Battle After Another” has an awareness level among survey moviegoers of 43% and an interest level of 46%. The one bright spot is that interest level among those who were aware of the film has risen over the past two weeks from 54% to 72%, suggesting that longtime fans of Anderson and DiCaprio are getting pulled in.
The ideal scenario for “One Battle” is a similar one to what “Sinners” carved out: get a solid opening weekend driven by the director’s biggest fans and then try to leg out over the next month from the effusive praise from those moviegoers and the critics.
This is where a relatively light wide release calendar for October could be an advantage, as the only four-quadrant tentpole coming next month is Disney’s “Tron: Ares,” which is looking at a $40-42 million domestic opening in early tracking when it comes out on Oct. 10.
Interestingly enough, there was a point where Warner did have a tentpole set for October with New Line’s “Mortal Kombat II,” only to move it to May 2026. Studio sources said at the time that the move was done in the hopes of replicating the mid-May success that “Final Destination: Bloodlines” had, especially given that “MK II” will have its biggest holdover competition upon opening from Lionsgate’s “Michael” rather than Marvel’s “Avengers: Doomsday,” which will be a holiday 2026 release.
Theaters have been looking anxiously for studios to deliver more films and have turned to alternative sources of programming, including a recently announced release party film for Taylor Swift’s next album “Life of a Showgirl” on October 3. The gaps that have been left behind by the drop in a consolidating Hollywood’s theatrical output have led to the inconsistency that has plagued the box office since the pandemic.
But for Warner, putting separation between “One Battle” and “Mortal Kombat II” could be advantageous for both films. “Sinners” legged out in the early summer against “The Accountant 2” and “Thunderbolts*,” a Marvel film that demonstrated that franchise’s declining interest among casual audiences. In a similar market without a clear blockbuster on the horizon, Warner no longer has to worry about two of its films cannibalizing each other.
Can LeoMania Rise Again?
If there’s any chance of “One Battle After Another” finding success in theaters, it will come down to whether DiCaprio can bring back the box office drawing power that served him well for nearly a quarter-century.
After “Titanic” turned the actor into a teenage heartthrob and gave rise to “LeoMania,” he made the career-changing move of pushing back against it with challenging drama roles in films from world-class directors like Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” and Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” in 2002. That move went on to make DiCaprio synonymous with film quality all the way through the end of the 2010s.
The list of hit dramas goes on and on: “The Departed,” “Inception,” “Django Unchained,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Revenant,” and most recently in 2019, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” His keen role choices and collaborations with proven filmmakers have given him a career box office total as a lead actor of $6.95 billion, with eight films — none of them franchise movies — that have grossed at least $350 million worldwide before inflation.
But since the pandemic, DiCaprio’s only theatrical role has been “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a 206-minute Scorsese film that grossed $156.4 million in 2023. His other film from this decade, “Don’t Look Up,” was a Netflix release on streaming only in 2021, though that film does still stand as the fourth most-watched Netflix film ever.
Studio sources have told TheWrap that DiCaprio’s lead star status is one of the major reasons why they believe “One Battle After Another” can draw an audience, but this will be the first time that the 50-year-old Oscar winner’s popularity as a movie star will be challenged in a radically changed entertainment space that has shifted even more away from star power than it was in the 2010s.
Ten years ago, DiCaprio won his Oscar with “The Revenant,” a film that grossed $533 million worldwide off mainstream buzz over scenes of the famously handsome actor eating an animal’s liver and getting mauled by a CGI bear. “One Battle After Another” sees him in a role that is not quite as grisly but is similarly unflattering. Whether it launches Paul Thomas Anderson into mainstream success will likely come down to whether that prospect is still of interest to the masses.