By Tessa Nolan
So the numbers are out for the new Paul Thomas Anderson film. And the verdict is in. It’s a flop. A bomb. A certified, nine-figure, red-ink-all-over-the-ledger disaster.
At least, that’s the headline you’ll see. The easy take. The one that says a film that cost a fortune and didn’t make a bigger fortune back is a failure, end of story. It’s a simple, clean narrative. And it’s almost completely wrong.
You look at the raw figures for One Battle After Another and it’s hard not to wince. A budget of at least 130 million dollars, plus marketing costs that were probably almost as much again. It needed to make something like 300 million just to see daylight, and it’s going to fall short by about 100 million. In the old world, that was a fireable offence. A career-killer.
And the thing is, this wasn’t some difficult, eat-your-vegetables art film. The critics all fell over themselves to say how much fun it was. A “rollercoaster ride”. An “action-packed, wildly entertaining night at the cinema”. And it stars Leonardo DiCaprio. Leonardo DiCaprio. If you can’t sell a fun-looking rollercoaster ride with him in the front seat, what on earth can you sell?
At first, you look at those numbers and it feels bleak. It feels like more proof that the only things people will leave the house for are superhero films and horror movies. That proper films, films made for grown-ups, are a dying business.
But then you look a bit closer, you talk to a few people, and you realise the story isn’t about the number on the balance sheet at all. Actually, scrap that. The balance sheet is the least interesting part of this story.
So why did they do it? Why did Warner Bros. write that enormous cheque for a director whose previous biggest hit made less than half of this film’s budget?
Because this film wasn’t really made for us, the audience. It was made for other filmmakers.
The whole affair is what the suits call a loss-leader. A prestige play. I remember a time, twenty years ago maybe, when a flop was just a flop. It was a simple equation. It lost money, heads rolled, the director went to ‘director jail’. That was it. This feels… different. More complicated.
A studio like Warner Bros. doesn’t just need to make money. It needs to look cool. It needs to be seen as a place where serious artists can come and do their best work. It’s like a fantastically wealthy person who buys a local, money-losing football club. They’re not in it for the gate receipts. They’re in it for the bragging rights, the glamour, the feeling that they are a patron of something important. They can afford to lose a bit of money on the team because their other businesses are printing it.
And Warner Bros. is printing money. They’ve had a huge year. Sinners, A Minecraft Movie, Superman. They can afford a vanity project.
And this is their vanity project. It’s the film they point to when people accuse them of only making cartoons and sequels. It’s the film that makes other A-list directors pick up the phone. They lost Christopher Nolan to Universal over a distribution squabble, and he went and made Oppenheimer for them, which was one of the biggest stories of the last couple of years. You can bet they don’t want that to happen again. So you spend 130 million on a Paul Thomas Anderson film. You let him make exactly the film he wants to make. You lose a bit of money. But maybe, just maybe, the next Ryan Coogler decides your studio is the place to be. That’s not a loss. That’s a long-term investment in talent.
The problem, if you want to call it that, isn’t that the film didn’t make money. The problem is that it cost a king’s ransom to make in the first place. For what it is – a dense, long, politically charged thriller with a weird sense of humour – the box office is actually pretty phenomenal. It’s by far Anderson’s most successful film. But you can’t judge it by the standards of a normal art-house film, because it had the budget of a blockbuster.
So is it an art film or a blockbuster? The truth is, it’s both. And neither. It’s a glorious, expensive, beautiful contradiction. The studio marketed it like an action movie, but it has the soul of an art-house picture. It’s a challenging, spiky, brilliant film that happens to star one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.
And in the end, that’s the safest bet a studio can make.
Think about it. If you spend 200 million on a superhero film and it flops, what are you left with? You’re left with nothing. An embarrassment. A write-down. A piece of useless IP. But if you spend a fortune on a Paul Thomas Anderson film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and it ‘flops’? You’re left with a Paul Thomas Anderson film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. You’re left with a film that will be talked about for years. A film that will be on ‘best of the decade’ lists. A film that will almost certainly win a bunch of awards.
And you get Leonardo DiCaprio to come to your Christmas party.
So no, this isn’t a failure. It’s just a different kind of success. The kind that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. It’s a sign that, even in the age of endless sequels and cinematic universes, there are still some people in Hollywood who are willing to lose a bit of money in order to make something that might actually last. And that, in itself, is something to be pleased about.
