One Battle After Another

• 1. Introduction

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  One Battle After Another, written, directed and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, sent about 1.5 million feet of film through its cameras. Those were VistaVision cameras, and cinematographer Michael Bauman said the system had not seen that volume of film in a long time. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a burned-out former revolutionary who is dragged back into an old fight. Around him swirl comedy, car chases and an argument about power in America. Why did Anderson hesitate for years over the book that inspired it? Who is the teenage girl at the center of the story, and how was she found? Why did a film that critics adored and the industry honored still miss its financial target? On set, the production went by the working title BC Project.

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• 2. Vineland Reimagined

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  Vineland, the 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, had lingered in Anderson's mind since the early 2000s. He kept putting off an adaptation because he believed his love for the book would stop him from reworking it fairly. Instead he imagined two separate films of his own. One was an "action car-chase movie" and the other was about a "female revolutionary". One Battle After Another ultimately emerged as a blend of those two stories, plus some elements of Vineland. The strongest borrowing from the novel was the father-daughter dynamic. As he wrote the screenplay, Anderson also folded in stories of his own.

  Anderson had already adapted a Pynchon book once, turning Inherent Vice into a feature film in 2014. In August 2024, sources indicated the film was titled The Battle of Baktan Cross, and rumors spread that it was loosely inspired by Vineland. The official title, One Battle After Another, was confirmed in March 2025.

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• 3. Revolutionaries and a Colonel

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  At the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a far-left militant group called the French 75 breaks out detained immigrants. Among its members are the lovers "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills. Perfidia sexually humiliates the commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw, and he becomes obsessed with her. Later he catches her planting a bomb and lets her go if she agrees to meet him for sex. Soon after, Perfidia is pregnant.

  Charlene is the name of the daughter Perfidia gives birth to. Pat tries to persuade Perfidia to settle down, but she abandons both of them to continue her revolutionary activities. A botched bank robbery ends with Perfidia arrested for murdering a security guard. Lockjaw arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for information on key French 75 members, and she enters witness protection. He uses what she told him to hunt down and summarily execute her comrades. Howard Sommerville, a French 75 member, gives Pat and Charlene stolen identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Perfidia flees witness protection for Mexico.

  Sixteen years later, in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, California, Bob lives off the grid as a paranoid stoner. Willa is a free-spirited, self-reliant teenager who resents his substance abuse. He has told her that her mother was a hero who died when Willa was a baby. Thanks to his anti-immigration efforts, Lockjaw is now a colonel and a prominent figure in the U.S. security agencies. He is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a white supremacist secret society. To hide his past interracial relationship with Perfidia, he decides that Willa must die. He hires the bounty hunter Avanti Q to capture Howard, whose distress signal goes out to the remaining French 75.

  Troops arrive in Baktan Cross under cover of an immigration and drug enforcement operation. Deandra, a French 75 member, rescues Willa before her school dance is raided. She takes Willa to a convent of revolutionary nuns, where Willa guesses the truth about her mother's betrayal. Bob, warned of the danger while high, escapes his raided house through a tunnel. Sergio St. Carlos, Willa's karate sensei and a community leader, helps him and evacuates immigrants through a hidden passage. Bob later crosses rooftops with Sergio's students, but he falls and is arrested, though nobody recognizes him.

  The Christmas Adventurers find evidence of Lockjaw's relationship with Perfidia, including the possibility that he fathered a child. They send a member named Tim Smith to kill both Lockjaw and Willa. Lockjaw traces Willa's phone to the convent, where Deandra is arrested. Holding Willa hostage, he tests their DNA in front of her and confirms that she is his biological daughter.

  Sergio arranges Bob's escape and drives him toward the convent, throwing him from the car when police give chase. Bob steals a car, reaches the convent and fails to kill Lockjaw with Sergio's rifle. Lockjaw then hires Avanti to kill Willa. Avanti refuses because of her age and agrees instead to deliver her to a far-right militia. Tim tracks down Lockjaw and shoots him in the face. Avanti has a change of heart, frees Willa and is killed in a shootout with the militia.

  Willa escapes in Avanti's car with his pistol, but Tim begins tailing her while Bob tries to catch up. She lures Tim into a crash by exploiting a blind summit. When he fails to recite the revolutionary countersign, she shoots and kills him. Bob finds Willa, and they embrace.

  Some time later, a severely scarred Lockjaw is seemingly welcomed into the Christmas Adventurers Club, but he is fatally gassed and cremated shortly afterward. Back home, Bob gives Willa a letter from Perfidia, who apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family someday. The film closes with Bob giving Willa his blessing as she leaves for a protest in Oakland.

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• 4. Finding Willa

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  In June 2023, Anderson's next film, rumored to star DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Viggo Mortensen and Joaquin Phoenix, found its home at Warner Bros. Pictures. In January 2024, DiCaprio and Hall were confirmed, and Sean Penn joined the cast. DiCaprio reportedly received his standard $25 million fee. In February, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Chase Infiniti, Shayna McHayle and Teyana Taylor signed on. The casting of Benicio del Toro was confirmed in June.

  Six months of auditions stood between Infiniti and the role of Willa Ferguson, the teenage daughter of the central character. The process included multiple callbacks, camera tests and chemistry reads with DiCaprio and Hall. Infiniti said of the reads, "They felt like the coolest kind of masterclass." She had worked as a kickboxing trainer, yet she still spent months training in karate and mixed martial arts. That training prepared her to do her own stunts and to handle intense scenes with Penn.

  Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis described how wide Anderson's brief had been. Willa could be anyone, she said, whether "they've ever acted before" or "if I found them in school, if I find them on the street". Anyone between 12 and 25 was in play. The search narrowed once she realized how much the part demanded physically. Kulukundis recalled that DiCaprio tried the part with a bunch of girls and was "really thoughtful and helpful". As she put it, "She just kept passing all the tests."

  Not everyone who tried made it through. Jacob Batalon later revealed that he had auditioned for the role of Comrade Josh.

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• 5. VistaVision on Location

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  In January 2024, principal photography began in California, with eleven days of shooting across Humboldt County in Arcata, Cutten, Eureka, Kneeland and Trinidad. The crew consulted local experts, including the Sisters of the Valley, who inspired the Sisters of the Brave Beaver in the film. To study music and fashion trends, Anderson and his crew attended the prom at Eureka High School. Students were then cast as extras for a key scene.

  On the 3rd of February, production moved to Sacramento, with filming at the Sacramento County Administration Building and the Sacramento County Courthouse. A homeless encampment was cleared to allow the shoot, which sparked controversy. The former Sacramento mansion of Governor Ronald Reagan stood in for exteriors of the Christmas Adventurers Club's headquarters. That choice tied the film back to the novel, since Pynchon's book focuses on Reagan.

  A two-and-a-half-month pause came because del Toro was committed to Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, shot between March and June 2024. He arrived with just ten days between projects. "I had 10 days to unpack and pack", he said, describing how he had to leave one character and become Sensei. He compared it to a carousel: "If you want to jump on a carousel, you generally want time to run and catch up and then jump in. There was none of that."

  Filming also took place in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Borrego Springs in May 2024, and in El Paso, Texas, in June 2024, including the El Paso Streetcars. Other locations included La Purísima Mission, the Westgate Hotel, the city of San Diego, and Otay Mesa near the border between Mexico and the United States.

  Michael Bauman shot the film on 35 mm film with VistaVision cameras. It was his third collaboration with Anderson, after Phantom Thread in 2017 and Licorice Pizza in 2021. Between 75 and 80% of the film used VistaVision. Bauman explained that studios built the format as a response to television. Rather than running film vertically through four perforations like a normal 35 mm camera, it runs horizontally through eight. Each frame is twice the size, which gives a richer image. The film became one of the first to use the format since the 1960s, after Brady Corbet's The Brutalist in 2024 seemed to revive it.

  Bauman stressed why this film could not look like The Brutalist, where Lol Crawley kept the camera on a tripod. "One Battle was always going to be about movement. It had to be handheld; it had to be on Steadicam; it had to be strapped to cars; it had to bounce around." He described the experience as "being on the knife's edge", mostly because the film was shot on location rather than on a sound stage.

  Anderson wanted something in the "vein of '70s cinema", and he pointed to The French Connection from 1971 and The Last Detail from 1973. Bauman said this "stylistic roughness" was essential to the story. For color and lighting, he and Anderson looked to the work of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai and to The Silence of the Lambs from 1991. They carried a print of The French Connection with them and screened it as a check on their visual palette.

  Michael Glazier, the location manager, found the setting for the final car chase almost by accident. He was driving after he had found the location for the 1776 camp. To capture the scene's dynamic energy, Bauman and his team worked with Allan Padelford, a veteran stunt coordinator and second unit director, and his Padelford Camera Car. In the end credits, Giovanni Ribisi is thanked for letting the production use VistaVision cameras that he had personally restored.

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• 6. Cut, Scored, Sold

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  Andy Jurgensen, who had previously edited Licorice Pizza, cut the film. He traveled to the location and watched dailies with Anderson on a vintage VistaVision horizontal projector borrowed from Warner Bros. "You understand what everyone's going through and you're part of the process", he said. "But that's Paul's style."

  The final car chase had no storyboards. It was shot over a number of days, and Anderson had ideas only for the beginning, middle and end. Jurgensen assembled a string-out of every perspective as the cars were filmed. The sequence leans on Willa's shots of her eyes, looking at the rear-view and side-view mirrors. In test screenings, Jurgensen said, "it was always people's favorite part."

  Beginning in January 2025, the film had multiple test screenings, which reinforced the rumored connection to Vineland. It was the first time since Boogie Nights in 1997 that Anderson agreed to audience testing. Based on the feedback, he cut eight to ten minutes. Jurgensen said Anderson does not like testing his films, and Warner Bros. had requested it. Anderson partly agreed because he wanted to know whether the film played as a comedy. Jurgensen added, "There are some sensitive things in the movie, both racial things and political things." The tests confirmed that the humor was working, and the studio, he said, never tried to enforce an ultimatum.

  Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist, composed the score, his sixth feature collaboration with Anderson. It was recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra under conductor Hugh Brunt and released by Nonesuch Records on the 26th of September 2025. The film also features two songs by Jon Brion, their first work together since Punch-Drunk Love in 2002. Adam Somner, the first assistant director and producer, also worked on his sixth film with Anderson. He died in November 2024, and the film is dedicated to him.

  In February 2024, Variety reported that the film had been greenlit with a $115 million production budget. By August 2024, The Wall Street Journal put the figure at "more than $140 million". The paper noted that Anderson's highest-grossing film at that point, There Will Be Blood in 2007, had earned only $76 million. Warner executives said DiCaprio's box-office track record justified the spending. In August 2025, Variety reported a final budget of $175 million, while Warner Bros. said $130 million. Either way, it is the most expensive film of Anderson's career. Deadline Hollywood reported that on-location shooting in California cost $101.6 million below the line, offset by a tax credit of $8.4 million.

  By September 2025, Variety reported that another $70 million had gone into marketing. On the 27th of March 2025, DiCaprio launched his own YouTube channel with the debut of the teaser trailer. Extended footage played during the Warner Bros. presentation at CinemaCon in April 2025. A second trailer arrived online on the 24th of July 2025. That same day, the film's Instagram account announced that it was coming to Fortnite Creative on the 12th of September. Posts on Twitter applied meme templates to out-of-context clips.

  Multiple film critics and news outlets found the campaign "confusing" and "unusual". Dana Nussbaum, co-head of global motion picture marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures, defended it. "Every campaign must be bespoke and you have to quickly shift based on what the audience is telling you", she said.

  The film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on the 8th of September 2025. A global tour began in London on the 16th, continued to Mexico City on the 18th, and ended in New York City on the 21st. It screened at Fantastic Fest on the 23rd, followed by previews on the 24th. Warner Bros. Pictures released it in the United States on the 26th of September. It is the first Anderson film released in IMAX. An earlier date of the 8th of August 2025 had been dropped to make room for a potential awards season campaign.

  VistaVision projection was offered at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles, Regal Union Square 17 in New York, Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, and Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London. Other formats included 4DX, digital IMAX, Dolby Vision, IMAX 70 mm and standard 70 mm. A 35 mm screening at the New Beverly Cinema was scheduled for June 2026.

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• 7. Acclaim and Awards

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  The film opened in 3,634 theaters in the United States and Canada, the widest release for an Anderson film and the first of his to debut wide. It made $8.8 million on its first day, including $3.1 million from Thursday previews. Its $22 million weekend topped the box office and beat the $4.9 million that There Will Be Blood earned in its fifth weekend in 2008. The second weekend brought $11 million, a drop of 50%, behind Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl. The run ended at $72.9 million in the U.S. and Canada and $140 million elsewhere, for $213 million worldwide. That makes it Anderson's highest-grossing release, yet a box-office disappointment against an estimated $300 million break-even point.

  Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of "A". Those at PostTrak rated it four-and-a-half out of five stars, and 74% said they would "definitely recommend" it. Critics were overwhelmingly positive, and several called it a "masterpiece".

  Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote that it "taps into the fierce urgency of now; it gives you a chill that's also a wake-up call". Justin Chang of The New Yorker called it "a father-daughter epic" and noted that you could count on one hand the scenes Bob and Willa share. Richard Lawson of The Hollywood Reporter called it "a furious film" and said Anderson showed "a previously unseen aptitude for action and suspense". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded it five stars.

  The performances drew their own praise. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com called Penn's work "his best work in years". David Sims of The Atlantic wrote that Penn's cold villainy "could win him a third Oscar". David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised "magnetically self-possessed newcomer/instant movie star Chase Infiniti" and called Taylor "eruptive". Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood called Penn "a riot to watch" and Taylor "dazzling".

  Not every critic agreed. William Bibbiani of TheWrap found the plot scattershot, unfocused and overly long, and the themes shallow. Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal wrote that "the reach is evident but the grasp is a little shaky". Liel Leibovitz of The Free Press saw only "total moral, artistic, and creative ruin" in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg, moderating a post-screening panel with Anderson, called the film "insane" and "really incredible". Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann and Paul Schrader also praised it.

  Producer Sara Murphy hoped the reception would encourage studios to back "risky" projects. "Original films are not usually done at this level of a big, good-time movie", she said.

  The American Film Institute and the National Board of Review each named it one of the ten best films of 2025, and the board gave it five awards, including Best Film. Film Comment, a New York Times readers poll and a Sight and Sound poll of over 100 international critics all ranked it first. In IndieWire's critics poll it finished at number one with 573 points. Of 148 critics voting, 101 placed it somewhere on their ballots, and 43 of those put it first. The film appeared on 735 year-end lists, with 212 ranking it first, more than any other 2025 film. Barack Obama's annual favorites list put it at the top, though that list was unranked.

  At the 31st Critics' Choice Awards, it won three awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Anderson. It earned nine nominations at the 83rd Golden Globes, the most of any film, and won four, including Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and Best Supporting Actress for Taylor. At the 32nd Actor Awards it received a record seven nominations, and Penn won for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role. The 79th British Academy Film Awards gave it a leading fourteen nominations and six wins, including Best Film and Best Director.

  At the 98th Academy Awards, the film received thirteen nominations, the second-most of any film that year. It won six: Best Picture for Somner, Murphy and Anderson, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Penn, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing for Jurgensen, and Best Casting for Kulukundis. She became the first-ever winner of that category.

  The film reached digital streaming on the 14th of November 2025 and began streaming on HBO Max on the 19th of December 2025. FlixPatrol reported that it became the most-streamed film on HBO Max within four days. After its Oscar success, it hit number one on the iTunes store in the United States on the 17th of March 2026, and it topped the charts in 33 other countries. A collectible 4K UHD Blu-ray SteelBook set for the 2nd of June 2026 promised a screen test from Infiniti and a 24-page booklet of behind-the-scenes photography.

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• 8. Politics and Perfidia

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  Jesse Hassenger of The Guardian observed that the film "has irked some on the right and galvanized others on the left". Some on the right accused it of being "an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism". Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times called it "an antifascist movie at a fascist moment", made before Donald Trump's return to office eight months earlier. Bret Easton Ellis said, "it's not a very good movie", and Armond White of National Review called it "openly seditious". Gleiberman answered that "it is not, in fact, a left-wing movie", arguing that attacking authoritarianism is not inherently left-wing.

  The raid on Otay Mesa Detention Center, an ICE facility, brings the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency into the story, though the agency is never named. Authority in the film is unpredictable, militarized, and able to destabilize whole neighborhoods. Many critics called the release timely amid the expansion of ICE operations under the second Trump administration. In February 2026, Murphy said that concurrent ICE operations in Minneapolis, which killed civilians, made the film "devastatingly" timely. In January 2026, Daniel Boguslaw of The American Prospect compared Lockjaw to Gregory Bovino, then commander of the U.S. Border Patrol.

  Perfidia Beverly Hills drew the sharpest debate. Ellen E. Jones of The Guardian said the film raises questions about how white male directors depict Black women, since two white men sexualize Perfidia. Bibbiani argued that Perfidia is a sex criminal. Maya Phillips of The New York Times called her "the most radical part" of the film.

  In November 2025, Taylor rejected the critiques. "Is that not what Black women go through? We are fetishized", she said, adding that the film should spark debate. In January 2026, she pointed out that the first thing we see of Perfidia is her holding a gun to a man's head. Perfidia, Taylor said, weaponizes her sexuality against her enemies and makes her choices in "survival mode". In February 2026, she called Perfidia "so misunderstood, but most importantly, human, and so raw". She noted that Perfidia's mother says she comes from a long line of revolutionaries, a pressure that became part of her identity.

  Backstage at the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026, Anderson addressed the critiques himself. "We knew that we weren't making something that was heroic and we needed to lean into that", he said. He described Perfidia as a hero who becomes an antihero, and he said her arc sets up the story of Willa, the next generation. "What happens when your parents, who are damaged and have handed quite a difficult history to you, how do you manage that?" he asked.

  In January 2026, Taylor said she was open to a sequel or companion piece that would expand Perfidia's story. She suggested a spinoff built from new scenes and footage that did not make the final cut. The following month she told IndieWire that conversations with Anderson were "very, very real". She wants to see what Perfidia did in those sixteen years, and she wants scenes with Perfidia and Willa together. Of the final shot, Taylor asked, "Where's she really going? Is she going to free Deandra? Is she going to find her mommy?"

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