One Box Office Battle After Another
If ever there was a demographic for Warner Bros Discovery to market to with One Battle After Another I’m right in it. Paul Thomas Anderson has made several of my favorite films. And not just the obvious ones like There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights — I love Magnolia and saw it opening weekend in theaters back in 1999 where I distinctly recall many people walking out when [spoiler alert — can it still be a spoiler alert 26 years later?] frogs started falling from the sky. It’s still one of my favorite experiences in a theater — Anderson had made the audience, who perhaps thought they were coming to see a Tom Cruise movie, so angry with one single scene that they left. Anyway, when P.T. Anderson has a new movie, I’m your guy.
But a funny thing happened on the way to seeing One Battle After Another in theaters. I had seen the trailer a number of times and honestly, I thought it looked a bit… dumb? Far too silly for my taste. Far more so than Inherent Vice! It left me feeling that Anderson might have his first real misstep. And given my love of his catalog, I was annoyed by this. So I was in no hurry to go see the movie.
Well, it now looks like I was right and very wrong.
By all accounts, One Battle After Another is one of the, if not the, best movie of the year. And also one of Anderson’s best movies. The critics and audiences seem fully aligned on these points. And so now I feel silly not going to see it opening weekend (to be fair, I was also traveling). But I feel more silly in doubting Anderson here.
But that doesn’t mean I was wrong with my thoughts on the trailer. I view myself as somewhat of a trailer connoisseur, with a long track record of being able to tell how a movie will perform simply based on the trailer. I even used to run a blog devoted to this notion! It’s harder now than it has ever been because marketing is so far beyond simply trailers these days. But for the most part, if a trailer sucks (at what it's trying to convey), the movie is going to bomb.
And, well, One Battle After Another is going to bomb. Again, not because it’s bad — it’s the opposite, apparently! — but because from the trailer on down, it was just marketed all wrong, and seemingly had a bad roll-out strategy.
Now, the trades are about to tout this as Anderson's best opening ever. And, sure. But that's a bit like touting Ichiro hitting a record number of home runs in a year. It's just not what the guy does. Coming in with a likely $21M opening can be framed as a success in that way, I guess. But if we're being honest, we're grading on a curve here – and one not taking inflation into account, naturally.
More to the point, the movie also cost a reported $130M to make — before marketing. That may push the total cost to $200M. That means the movie is going to need to pull in somewhere in the $300M to $400M range to break-even at the box office. And with a $20-ish million opening, that is just very, very unlikely to happen.
I mean, stranger things have happened, such as when another movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio opened with twenty-some million at the box office in 1997, which seemed like a problem given the movie was reported to be the most expensive movie ever made at the time and was massively delayed. But then it kept making $20M every single weekend for the next many weeks. Until it became the highest grossing movie of all time, at the time.
So yeah, that was weird. But it was also word-of-mouth. And if ever a movie can also benefit from such buzz in 2025, it feels like One Battle After Another is that movie. But it’s also not the epic love story with the perfect song. They both are around 3 hours long, but an R-rated film full of political statements and not rags-to-riches glamour feels like, well, a tougher sell.
And again, 2025 just makes it a tougher sell still. That $28M opening for Titanic in 1997 is more like a $60M opening in 2025 dollars. That’s pretty respectable.
This is where film Xitter gets angry. "It’s about the art, not the box office!" Which is true, but also false. If movies like these keep performing poorly, eventually they will stop making them. Yes, even P.T. Anderson movies. That is the cold hard reality of the business in this era. You either die the theatrical hero or live long enough to see your movies go straight to streaming. Believe me, I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but it is what it is.
And one way to at least slow that reality is to market such films correctly and have a good overall release strategy. Forget Peyton Manning or whatever silly ideas you have to appeal to the youths. We don’t need Fortnite characters here — this really happened, apparently! We just need a solid trailer and to let good, old fashioned word-of-mouth do its thing. This was, perhaps, overthought.
It also means a movie like this probably doesn’t open in 7,000+ screens. You go far more bespoke to start. Focus on Anderson's love of eclectic film formats. Get the word of mouth going as that will so obviously be the key here. I know that seems impossible to do with a $200M movie, but it’s better than the movie opening in a bunch of half-empty theaters around the country.
The movie is great, that’s the strength. It's that simple. Use that, don't try to squeeze it into viral moments – especially when your talent isn't particularly suited to that. I realize that’s a decidedly old school approach and tactic, but that was the play here. Anderson is not Christopher Nolan making massive epics, his movies take a far more nuanced approach to market.
Anyway, I’ll get off the soap box now and go buy a ticket.
Update September 28, 2025: The weekend tally has risen slightly to $22.4M per Brooks Barnes of NYT. But as he also notes, the second weekend will bring a new challenge with a new out-of-the-blue Taylor Swift movie to market her new album release hitting theaters and undoubtedly blow the box office doors off...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler