One Battle After Another

The Most Surprising Blockbuster of 2025

There is a version of this story where everything makes sense. A beloved auteur who hasn't made a bad film in three decades finally gets the green light on the passion project he's been trying to mount since 2003. He hires the biggest movie star on the planet, writes an audacious script from one of American literature's most labyrinthine novels, shoots it on a camera format that hasn't been commercially deployed since the Kennedy administration, and somehow talks Warner Bros. into writing a check that approaches $175 million. The studio gets its prestige; the director gets his masterpiece.

Then Variety runs the math, and that version of the story gets complicated. One Battle After Another grossed $209.3 million worldwide on a budget that, with marketing, likely topped $250 million. The trade called it a loss of roughly $100 million. And yet — here is the thing — Paul Thomas Anderson made $209 million at the global box office. That is more money than any film he has ever made. More than Boogie Nights, more than Magnolia, more than The Master, more than Phantom Thread. His previous ceiling was There Will Be Blood's $77 million worldwide. He has now more than doubled it.

So what is One Battle After Another? A disaster or a triumph? A late-career gamble that paid off creatively and bankrupted its backers financially? The answer, characteristically for a film adapted from Thomas Pynchon, is: yes, all of it, simultaneously.

With 13 Academy Award nominations — including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, dual Best Supporting Actor nominations for Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn, and Best Supporting Actress for Teyana Taylor — the film lands at the Oscars as the most technically ambitious and narratively uncompromising major-studio release in years. It is a war film without a war, a chase movie where the thing being chased is America's political soul, and an action epic that somehow finds room for a stoned DiCaprio arguing with a history teacher about the correct categorization of the Battle of Thermopylae.

It is, in other words, exactly the film you would expect Paul Thomas Anderson to make — and utterly unlike any other film released this decade.

The Plot: Guerrillas, Fathers, and the Long Shadow of the Sixties

The film opens in a style that feels deliberately intoxicating — the "French 75" sequence, named after the classic cocktail and double-barreled like one. A loose collective of radical activists robs a bank in California in 1970, moves on to liberating a federal detention center holding undocumented farmworkers, and then melts back into the eucalyptus-and-pot-smoke haze of the late California counterculture. They are charismatic, doomed, and funny. This is PTA world: even your political idealists have the timing of stand-up comics and the self-destructiveness of jazz musicians.

Then the film time-jumps sixteen years. It is 1986, Reagan is president, and the French 75 is scattered history. The camera finds Pat Calhoun — Leonardo DiCaprio, older, softer, wreathed in cannabis smoke — in the middle of a genuinely baffling argument with a junior high school teacher about whether his daughter Willa's history textbook is engaging in state-sanctioned revisionism. He is not wrong, exactly. He is also clearly stoned, wearing a cardigan that has seen better decades, and driving a car that would not pass inspection.

Pat Calhoun was once a member of the French 75. Now he is a single father in Humboldt County, tending weed plants and raising Willa (Chase Infiniti, in a debut performance of remarkable precision) with a devotion that is somehow both paranoid and genuinely tender. The revolution failed. The crew dispersed. And somewhere in the federal apparatus, a figure called Lockjaw has been waiting.

Lockjaw is Sean Penn at his most maniacally off-leash: a high-ranking military officer so corrupt that his authority seems to be a kind of elaborate performance he sustains purely through the force of his own menacing confidence. He wants the French 75 — specifically, he wants to use their existing warrants to force one of them into federal cooperation. When Willa disappears, Pat has to do what he has spent sixteen years avoiding: make phone calls.

The reunion of the old crew drives the film's second and third acts. Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, incandescent) is the moral engine of the group — the one who never lost the thread of what they were actually fighting for. The del Toro character operates in a more ambiguous, morally fungible space that the film deliberately refuses to resolve. Side characters bloom and vanish. The California landscape — redwoods, coast highway, suburban taco stands, federal outposts of inexplicable authority — shifts between idyllic and menacing with PTA's characteristic sleight of hand.

The film's climax — a car chase so elaborately constructed it reportedly took three months of editing to complete — takes place partly on a stretch of northern California highway and partly through a landscape that seems to exist somewhere between waking life and collective guilt. It is the kind of ending that divides audiences violently. It is also the kind of ending that, five years from now, people will cite as one of the great closing sequences of 21st-century American cinema.

20 Years in the Making: PTA and Pynchon

The history of failed Pynchon adaptations is short and absolute. Thomas Pynchon, who has not made a public appearance since 1957, maintains a near-total wall around his fiction — not out of indifference to film, but because he understands the violence that screen adaptation does to dense, labyrinthine prose. The Crying of Lot 49 has been optioned and abandoned approximately seventeen times. Gravity's Rainbow is considered unfilmable by serious people and the subject of endless fantasy casting by serious cinephiles. Even Inherent Vice, PTA's own 2014 Pynchon adaptation, required a novel that, by Pynchon's standards, is relatively linear — a stoner neo-noir with a beginning, a middle, and something that resembles an end.

Vineland, published in 1990, was different. It is Pynchon's most domestic and, for Pynchon, most accessible novel — a Reagan-era meditation on the fate of the 1960s counterculture, told through the adventures of a stoned former radical and his teenage daughter. It has genuine plot mechanics. It has characters who resemble human beings. And it is, at its core, about a father and a daughter and what a generation loses when it stops fighting. Paul Thomas Anderson read it and saw a movie.

Pynchon's blessing was, insiders say, not easily obtained. The reclusive author has a documented history of issuing sharp cease-and-desist letters to projects that proceed without his approval, and his estate is equally protective. What changed — what finally moved Pynchon to agree — is not fully known. What is documented is that PTA spent years building a relationship, sharing drafts of the screenplay, and ultimately convincing one of the most famously unmovable figures in American letters that his book would be handled with care.

The fact that PTA had already made one successful Pynchon film — Inherent Vice, which while commercially modest won widespread critical admiration and is now rightly considered one of the decade's finest comedies — presumably helped the case. Whatever the conversation was, Anderson emerged from it with something almost no filmmaker alive can claim: the enthusiastic blessing of Thomas Pynchon.

The VistaVision Gamble: A Dead Format Resurrects Itself

Before we talk about what VistaVision looks like, it is worth explaining what it is — because the format's obscurity is precisely the point. VistaVision was developed by Paramount Pictures in the mid-1950s as a response to the CinemaScope widescreen format that Twentieth Century Fox had weaponized in the post-television box office wars. Rather than use an anamorphic lens to squeeze a wide image onto standard film stock, VistaVision ran the film horizontally through the camera — eight standard perforations per frame instead of the normal four, the film moving sideways rather than top-to-bottom. The result was a frame of enormous resolution, comparable in information density to modern large-format digital sensors, with a particular textural quality — a kind of horizontal grain structure — that no digital format has convincingly replicated.

Paramount used VistaVision for prestige productions through the late 1950s: White Christmas, To Catch a Thief, The Ten Commandments, Vertigo. By the early 1960s, the format was commercially dead, replaced by cheaper widescreen alternatives. A handful of industrial and special-effects applications kept the cameras in use through the 1970s — ILM shot Star Wars effects elements in VistaVision — but the format had not been used for a major theatrical narrative production since the Eisenhower era.

Cinematographer Michael Bauman, who receives a Best Cinematography nomination for the work here, shot between 75 and 80 percent of the film in VistaVision. This was not a decision arrived at easily. The cameras — some sourced from museum collections, some rebuilt from parts, some engineered from scratch by specialized fabricators — required a degree of mechanical intervention that has no modern equivalent. Film stock compatible with the format's horizontal transport had to be sourced and tested. Lenses designed for a format that has been out of commercial production for sixty years had to be found, restored, or newly manufactured.

The result on screen is something genuinely strange and beautiful. VistaVision does not look like digital large-format. It does not look like 35mm anamorphic or 70mm spherical. It has its own quality — simultaneously grainier and more detailed than modern film, with a handling of motion that feels as though each frame was holding on to the moment slightly longer than the eye expects. PTA and Bauman weaponized this quality in the film's action sequences, particularly the car chase finale, which reportedly took three months to cut and is, frame for frame, some of the most technically extraordinary location cinematography in the decade's cinema.

Bauman's Oscar nomination is for a body of work that will be studied in cinematography schools for years. The challenge of achieving consistent exposure, color, and motion handling across a format that has not been commercially deployed in sixty years — while operating in handheld and Steadicam configurations that the format was never designed for — is an engineering and artistic achievement of the first order.

How DiCaprio Became Pat Calhoun

Leonardo DiCaprio does not often make films like this. His recent career has been defined by a careful curation of prestige projects — collaborations with Scorsese, Tarantino, and Inarritu — in which he reliably delivers the magnitude of performance the budget and the marketing require. He is bankable, decorated, and precise. What he is not, typically, is loose. Uncontrolled. Silly. Embarrassing in the way that a great comic performance requires its subject to be genuinely embarrassing.

Pat Calhoun requires all of those things. He is a man in permanent mid-collapse — stoned, suspicious, politically marooned somewhere between his radical past and his parental present, arguing with schoolteachers, mistrustful of cars he recognizes, eating cereal at 3pm in a bathrobe that is more robe than bathrobe. DiCaprio plays him with a kind of reckless physical generosity that is unlike anything in his recent filmography. He is funny. He is genuinely and uncomfortably funny, in the way that people who have been deeply, disappointedly idealistic can be funny — the humor is a reaction to grief.

Anderson has spoken in interviews about the origins of the casting: DiCaprio recalled first talking to PTA "years ago, when he casually came up to visit me and my friend Lukas Haas at my place." The two men have been circling a collaboration for the better part of two decades. The friendship predates the project; the project, when it finally materialized, was designed around DiCaprio's specific capacities.

DiCaprio reportedly received $25 million against the backend — his standard fee for a studio commitment of this scale. The investment is visible in every frame he occupies. This is not a performance being assembled in an editing room. The scene where Pat Calhoun receives news of his daughter's disappearance — a scene that runs, without cuts, for nearly four minutes — is as good as anything DiCaprio has done since The Aviator. The scene where he reassembles the French 75 over a series of pay phone calls, increasingly sobering with each conversation, is better.

His Best Actor nomination is the film's centerpiece Oscar case, though the race is complicated by the presence of other strong contenders. The Academy has historically been reluctant to reward comedic performances — even great ones — and DiCaprio's work here is at least half comedy. Whether voters see it as a serious acting achievement or "Leo being funny" may determine the outcome. The performance deserves the former assessment. It is precisely calibrated, emotionally true, and never condescending toward a man who might, in less careful hands, be dismissed as a joke.

The Villains: Penn, Del Toro, and the Problem of Splitting the Vote

The Best Supporting Actor category at the 98th Academy Awards contains a genuinely unusual wrinkle: two of the five nominees are from the same film. Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn are both nominated for One Battle After Another, playing the twin poles of the film's antagonist architecture. They are both extraordinary. They may cancel each other out entirely.

Sean Penn as Lockjaw is, to put it plainly, one of the most unhinged major-studio villain performances in recent memory. Lockjaw is a military officer of apparently unlimited institutional authority, a man so deeply embedded in the federal bureaucracy that his corruption has become structural — it is no longer distinguishable from the system itself. Penn plays him with a kind of furious stillness: the menace is in what he doesn't do, in the space between his sentences, in the way his eyes track a room with the detached assessment of a predator who is not currently hungry but is always filing information for later. Penn received his first Oscar in 2004; this performance suggests he has been in no particular hurry to match it.

Benicio del Toro's role is deliberately less defined than Penn's. Where Lockjaw is a fixed, known quantity of malevolence, del Toro's character operates in the film's moral gray zones — he is an antagonist who retains the capacity for something like conscience, and the film's most morally complex scenes involve del Toro and DiCaprio in extended two-handers that the screenplay refuses to resolve cleanly. Del Toro has never played a character quite like this. The performance is quieter than his Oscar-winning work in Traffic, and more unsettling for it.

The Breakouts: Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor

In a film with three Oscar-nominated veterans in lead and supporting roles, two of the most discussed performances belong to women who came to the project from very different directions.

Chase Infiniti makes her film debut as Willa, Pat Calhoun's teenage daughter — the character who functions, in the film's emotional architecture, as the only thing that matters. Willa is not a passive MacGuffin whose kidnapping motivates the plot. She is a specific, fully realized human being with her own politics, her own friends, her own capacity for judgment about her father's failures and her own understanding of why she loves him anyway. Infiniti was reportedly discovered through a casting search that screened thousands of young performers; she is, on screen, the discovery that justifies a thousand-person search. Her scenes with DiCaprio have a lived-in chemistry that is difficult to manufacture. It does not feel like acting. It feels like watching two people who know each other pretending to not know each other.

Teyana Taylor, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, plays Perfidia Beverly Hills — a name that is, in full Pynchon fashion, both absurd and precisely descriptive. Perfidia is the French 75's moral center: the one who never entirely stopped fighting, who finds Pat's cannabis-sedated resignation both understandable and inexcusable, and who functions as the film's political conscience in scenes that could easily tip into rhetoric and instead land as drama. Taylor is primarily known as a singer and visual artist; her work as an actor began with PTA's Licorice Pizza (where she appeared in a smaller role) and has evolved, here, into a full leading-woman performance. The nomination is deserved. The performance is the film's emotional anchor.

It is worth noting that Alana Haim — another Licorice Pizza alumna and a member of the pop group HAIM — also appears in a supporting role that, while not Oscar-nominated, continues the fascinating collaborative relationship between PTA and the Haim family. Haim's ease in front of PTA's camera, evident from her feature debut in Licorice Pizza, is fully developed here into something like a repertory company sensibility. She is the latest addition to a list of PTA performers — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Joaquin Phoenix — who find something in his collaboration that they cannot find elsewhere.

The Cast

The Numbers: What $209 Million Means (and Doesn't)

Let's do the math slowly, because it is genuinely interesting. Variety reported that One Battle After Another would lose approximately $100 million in its theatrical run. That sounds catastrophic, and in terms of the specific theatrical profitability calculation — production budget + marketing against theatrical rental (approximately 50% of box office gross) — it probably is. Warner Bros. spent enormous sums acquiring North American rights alone (a reported $100M+), and the film's below-expectations domestic performance ($72.2 million) and strong but insufficient international showing ($137.1 million) did not generate the rental revenue to cover those costs.

And yet. The film is Paul Thomas Anderson's highest-grossing movie of his entire career. By a significant margin. There Will Be Blood, his previous commercial peak, made $77 million worldwide. One Battle After Another made $209.3 million. He has roughly tripled his career best. For a director whose films have historically earned between $10 million (The Master) and $77 million, crossing $200 million is a structural shift in how the industry calculates his audience.

The streaming and home video window will recover significant additional revenue, and the film's awards season profile — 13 Oscar nominations guarantee sustained attention through March 2026 — will drive additional theatrical grosses in markets where it is still in release. The final tally for Warner Bros. will be better than the initial theatrical math suggested. Whether it will be profitable depends on accounting conventions that the studios do not publicize.

What is not in doubt is the precedent. A Paul Thomas Anderson film made $209 million worldwide. Studios will remember that number. His next negotiation will be different.

Jonny Greenwood and the Score

Jonny Greenwood's fifth PTA score — following There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, and Phantom Thread (which earned him his first Oscar nomination) — represents one of the great sustained director-composer collaborations in contemporary cinema. For One Battle After Another, Greenwood was tasked with something new: the music needed to operate simultaneously in two time periods, reflecting both the late 1960s and the mid-1980s without evoking either in a nostalgic or pastiche way.

His solution — strings doing things strings should not do, electronics that sound like they are malfunctioning in interesting directions, folk-adjacent acoustic elements processed into near-unrecognizability — is characteristically unpredictable. The film's opening sequence uses a theme so agitated and compressed that it feels like a countdown clock made of horsehair and anxiety. The scenes of Pat Calhoun in Humboldt County get something more ambient and uncertain, as though the music has misplaced its own time signature. The finale achieves what the best PTA-Greenwood music achieves: it does not underscore the action. It recontextualizes it, makes you uncertain whether what you are watching is triumphant or tragic.

Greenwood's Best Original Score nomination is his fifth overall and his second for a PTA film. The category is historically competitive at the 98th ceremony, but his work here is among the strongest of his career.

Cutting "Breakneck": Andy Jurgensen in the Editing Room

Andy Jurgensen, PTA's editor since The Master (2012), describes cutting One Battle After Another as the most demanding project of their collaboration — which, given that it includes Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, is saying something substantial. Anderson reportedly arrived at the editing room daily with multiple versions of every scene, shot in the improvisational, covering-everything style he has developed over thirty years of making films. The assembly cut, before Jurgensen's systematic reduction, was apparently in excess of four hours.

The car chase finale consumed the most intensive editorial attention. Described by Jurgensen as the most technically complex sequence he has cut in his career, the chase was shot over multiple weeks across two California locations, in VistaVision and 35mm, with cameras in positions that required extraordinary coordination between the cinematography team and the stunt drivers. The cut that made it into the film took approximately three months to complete — an extraordinary investment of post-production time in a single sequence. The result is a piece of action editing that functions simultaneously as pure physical excitement and something more philosophically weighted, a chase that feels like it means something beyond the question of who is catching whom.

Jurgensen's Best Film Editing nomination is his third overall for PTA films. The editing is never obvious — one of the highest compliments available — and in the film's quieter scenes, the decision of where to cut and where to allow a take to breathe contributes as much to the film's emotional impact as the performance itself.

All 13 Oscar Nominations

The 98th Academy Awards nominations, announced January 2026, placed One Battle After Another in contention across every major category. With 13 nominations, it sits behind the lead film in the race but ahead of every other title in the field. A best-case sweep scenario is unlikely; a worst-case shutout would be extraordinary. The film is competitive in at least half of its nominated categories.

• ★
  Best PictureOne Battle After Another
• ★
  Best DirectorPaul Thomas Anderson
• ★
  Best ActorLeonardo DiCaprio
• ★
  Best Supporting ActorBenicio del Toro
• ★
  Best Supporting ActorSean Penn
• ★
  Best Supporting ActressTeyana Taylor
• ★
  Best Adapted ScreenplayPaul Thomas Anderson
• ★
  Best CinematographyMichael Bauman
• ★
  Best Film EditingAndy Jurgensen
• ★
  Best Production DesignOne Battle After Another
• ★
  Best Original ScoreJonny Greenwood
• ★
  Best SoundOne Battle After Another
• ★
  Best CastingCassandra Kulukundis

The Best Casting nomination — introduced as a new Oscar category in recent years — recognizes Cassandra Kulukundis's work in assembling a cast of this complexity and ambition. Finding Chase Infiniti alone, through a nationwide search of thousands of candidates, would arguably justify the nomination. That the rest of the ensemble is equally well-chosen speaks to a casting process of unusual care and precision.

The Best Adapted Screenplay nomination is PTA's most vulnerable major-category bet — Pynchon's source material is well known, and adaptations of literary works with this much existing cultural commentary tend to attract critics who will spend their energy on what was changed rather than what was achieved. Anderson's screenplay is nonetheless a remarkable piece of work: the solution to an adaptation problem that defeated everyone who attempted it for thirty years.

The Trailer

The official theatrical trailer, released by Warner Bros. in summer 2025, was widely circulated and generated significant discussion — both for the footage itself and for the unusual compositional choices (the trailer does not reveal the film's second half at all, cutting to black well before the third act). It remains one of the more effective pieces of studio marketing for a prestige film in recent memory.

Where to Watch

Following its September 26, 2025 theatrical release, One Battle After Another has entered its home video and streaming window. Select cinemas are maintaining the film through the awards season. Check local listings for remaining theatrical engagements, particularly in major markets where VistaVision-capable projection systems allow the film to be shown in its intended format.

Streaming availability varies by region. The film is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures in North America. Check local platforms for current VOD status.

The Verdict: A Quintessential PTA Situation

There is a term that has circulated in film criticism since the 2000s — a quintessential PTA situation — which refers to the peculiar intersection that Paul Thomas Anderson always seems to occupy: critically celebrated, Academy-nominated, commercially underperforming, and somehow both more and less successful than anyone expected. Boogie Nights was that. Magnolia was that. The Master was definitively, overwhelmingly that.

One Battle After Another is that situation scaled to its largest possible dimensions. $175 million. 13 Oscar nominations. $209 million at the global box office. A reported $100 million loss in theatrical. The adaptation of an unadaptable novel that Pynchon himself blessed. VistaVision. DiCaprio. Sean Penn being the most menacing he has been in twenty years. Teyana Taylor nominated for a role that came from PTA looking at a non-actress and seeing something the entire industry had missed.

The film will find its audience on streaming, as PTA's films always eventually do. The car chase will be screen-grabbed and analyzed. The DiCaprio-Infiniti scenes will be clipped for acting reels. The VistaVision footage will be shown in film schools as an example of what is possible when a director is given both the resources and the autonomy to make decisions that no committee would sanction. Jonny Greenwood's score will appear on playlists without attribution and confuse people into Shazaming it.

Whether it wins on March 15, 2026 is almost beside the point. One Battle After Another is already the thing it was always going to be: the most expensive, most audacious, most technically singular American film of 2025. The battle, as Thomas Pynchon might have written, continues.