Why Nobody Went To See One of the Biggest, Best Movies of the Year Actorsvaultpro

One Battle After Another grossed $3.1 million in preview screenings this Thursday and is projected to earn approximately $22.4 million in the United States and $48.5 million worldwide. Those aren’t terrible numbers for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, or for a relatively obscure literary adaptation that’s expected to compete for Oscars. Anderson’s last feature, Licorice Pizza, grossed only around $350,000 in its opening weekend, and his highest-grossing film to date, There Will Be Blood, grossed a total of $77 million. But One Battle After Another is so much more than a movie for PTA fans or awards watchers.

For one thing, it costs a lot more, reportedly around $140 million. One Battle After Another has a budget approaching that of a movie about superheroes, dinosaurs, wizards, or race cars. It’s a big, bold, Hollywood blockbuster, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, no less. It’s got good guys, bad guys, guns, explosions, and even boasts some of the craziest car chases in recent cinematic history. So why did audiences turn out for the dinosaurs and race cars, but stay home for this? The film’s political bent and lengthy runtime have been offered as possible explanations, and these issues may have deterred a small percentage of viewers; however, the real reason is more basic.

‘One Battle After Another’ Was an Unknown Quantity

Warner Bros.

One Battle After Another isn’t just masterful; it’s also broadly entertaining, which is something critics have been trying their best to convey. The film has received some of the strongest reviews of the year, if not the century, and the director and his stars have been selling it hard on podcasts and late-night shows. Still, the box office results are roughly the same as if Anderson had made another staid but respectable film about pudding cups or cults or post-war British fashion. That’s not because the public has seen PTA films and decided they don’t care for them. It’s because not that many people know who Paul Thomas Anderson is.

Anderson isn’t a household name, much less a box office draw, beyond a certain sphere of cinephiles. He never took on a comic book movie or a Star Wars installment. The masses learned about Christopher Nolan because of The Dark Knight, which undoubtedly helped Oppenheimer. One Battle After Another is the closest thing Anderson has made to The Dark Knight, but without the benefit of a globally popular main character. That’s the other strike the film has against it. If relatively few people knew anything about Paul Thomas Anderson, even fewer people knew anything about One Battle After Another.

It’s no secret that superhero movies aren’t doing as well as they used to, but intellectual property still reigns supreme, as do films that cater to families with tween-age kids. Ne Zha 2, Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, and How to Train Your Dragon are the top-performing movies of the year thus far. The first film on the list that can reasonably be called an original adult drama is F1: The Movie, and it still relies heavily on a brand name. When audiences do make the effort to see things that aren’t remakes or sequels, they tend to seek out titles that signal they’ll fit predictably within the confines of familiar genres, such as comedy or romance, but most reliably horror. Weapons is the most recent example. Sinners is (sort of) another.

Warner Bros. Pictures is the studio behind all three films — Weapons, Sinners, and One Battle After Another — and it’s campaigning them all this awards season. There’s more to Weapons and much more to Sinners than audiences may have expected going in, but that’s not what’s important when it comes to ticket sales. What’s important is that people could identify them both as horror movies. General audiences didn’t seem to know what to make of One Battle After Another.

‘One Battle After Another’ Is a Modern Masterpiece

But It’s a Difficult Movie To Market

Leonardo DiCaprio talking on a public phone in one battle after another

The first trailer for One Battle After Another dropped in March 2025. In it, DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson makes a desperate call at a pay phone in an attempt to find his teenage daughter, Willa. However, he can’t remember the last part of the secret code used by the resistance organization to which he once belonged. From there, the trailer goes on to showcase more of the movie’s highlights, like Bob’s team-up with Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio and the hilly California road that serves as the setting for its climax. It’s a trailer that’s custom-designed to hype up the kind of person who couldn’t wait for One Battle After Another to hit theaters, but it may have left casual moviegoers confused about its tone.

A second trailer was released in July. Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills says, “The message is clear,” except, as far as viewers were concerned, it wasn’t. While the first trailer, with its lingering shots and percussive score, captured the spirit of a PTA movie, the second one was much more traditional and much less impressive. It’s choppy, out of context, and the tone is even more confusing. While the first trailer seemed to advertise a fun arthouse film, the second one seemed to advertise a serious action movie. Arthouse movies don’t make much money, and action movies struggle to when they don’t star the likes of Iron Man or John Wick. With One Battle After Another, audiences (who weren’t already initiated into the PTA fan club) didn’t know what they were getting outside of Leonardo DiCaprio and something about revolution.

The good news is that it could change for the better with positive word of mouth after the opening weekend. One Battle After Another doesn’t fit neatly into one genre, and it isn’t a particularly easy movie to describe. What will matter most to people is the recommendations of other regular people. Though Sinners had the advantage of Ryan Coogler (who directed not one but two Marvel movies) and the horror label, it had legs because the people who saw it mostly liked or loved it. It earned an impressive A Cinemascore. So did One Battle After Another, which means the people who’ve seen it mostly like or love it, too. Anderson’s modern masterpiece might not make Minecraft money, but it could still win people to its cause. One Battle After Another is in theaters now.