Billboard Women in Music 2025
Leonardo DiCaprio hit CinemaCon on Tuesday to debut a new look at Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “One Battle After Another,” an $130 million adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that’s one of those big, bold bets that studios rarely make anymore. It’s the first time DiCapro and Anderson have ever collaborated — DiCaprio almost starred in Anderson’s breakout “Boogie Nights,” but left the project to appear in “Titanic,” and the rest, as they say, is history.
“I’ve been wanting to work with Paul for, gosh, 20 years now,” DiCaprio said. “With this film he’s tapped into something politically and culturally that’s burning beneath our psyche.”
DiCaprio went on to promise that the film unspools on an “incredibly epic scale.” In that spirit, Anderson directed the film in VistaVision for Imax.
The film finds DiCaprio playing a hard-living revolutionary who is trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter. In off-beat, often hilarious footage shared at CinemaCon by DiCaprio and his co-stars Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor, DiCaprio’s character struggles to remember the password that will bring a group of radicals to his assistance.
“I fried my brain,” DiCaprio admits on a phone call with an operative. “I have abused drugs and alcohol for the past 30 years. I am a drug and alcohol lover.”
But the voice on the other end of the line isn’t sympathetic, telling DiCaprio’s character that he’s being too aggressive and is making him feel unsafe because his raised voice is giving him “noise triggers.”
“This is not the way revolutionaries do shit,” DiCaprio says in frustration.
“One Battle After Another” boasts a top-shelf cast. Sean Penn co-stars as the film’s main villain, a steely-eyed colonel who looked pretty frigging scary in the footage, while Benicio del Toro is DiCaprio’s gun-toting, gonzo comrade. Newcomer Chase Infiniti rounds out the cast. The project has been shrouded in secrecy — Warner Bros., the studio behind the film, didn’t even reveal its title until a few weeks ago.
“One Battle After Another” has attracted a great deal of media attention for its budget, a massive figure for a movie that doesn’t feature superheroes or space battles. None of Anderson’s films have ever grossed anywhere close to what is being spent on “One Battle After Another,” though many are considered to be among the greatest movies ever made. DiCaprio’s box office track record is enviable, however. In the past, he’s turned challenging fare like “The Revenant” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” into unlikely financial hits.
There’s certainly about 1,000 times the action of Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” The latest trailer overflows with car chases, machine gun battles, Swat teams kicking down doors and one stressed out DiCaprio.
“Don’t fucking panic,” DiCaprio says at the end of the trailer. “Keep your shit together.”
“One Battle After Another” was originally slated to debut this summer, but Warner Bros. recently moved the film from August 8 to September 26, 2025, where it will be more likely to be part of the awards conversation.
