The One Battle After Another box office is in itself a narrative that reflects the work. The movie came out September 26, 2025 and as of mid-April 2026, it’s pulled in $72.9M in North America and a worldwide take of $212.9 million. Despite being director Paul Thomas Anderson’s (PTA) biggest cash winner, One Battle After Another is seen as a box office letdown for failing to hit the estimates of a stratospheric $300 million. It topped box office takes on its opening weekend, but by weekend two, it dropped behind the opening of Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl.
Still, it’s a financial and critical win, as its budget was estimated by Variety as $175 million, and of course, it obliterated at the awards podium, winning Best Picture and five other Oscars. Collider gushed, calling it the best film of 2025, and listing it as #9 in their article “10 Greatest Movie Masterpieces of the Last 10 Years.”
So… why was the One Battle After Another box office underwhelming?
And why do we feel kind of unenthused? Let’s take a look.
It’s clear that One Battle After Another is meant to be a free-wheeling, spirited, madcap adventure with real moral stakes that are definitely relevant to our weird times. It’s based on the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland. Two clear analogues are the Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove and the famous John Kennedy Toole picaresque Confederacy of Dunces. Sadly, I feel One Battle After Another falls well short of the brilliance of the other two works.
One Battle After Another plot summary
Time for a quick summary of the movie, for those of you who are rusty on the deets.
- We meet Pat “Ghetto” Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills, members of the militant French 75, who bust out immigrant detainees from a detention center. The timeframe here is approximately 2010, but the vibe is modern and of course the ICE analogue is clear. Perhaps confusingly so.
- Perfidia encounters the detention center commander, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whom she taunts sexually, which he enjoys.
- Later, Lockjaw catches Perfidia in the act of planting a bomb. He lets her go, but only when she agrees to meet him in private. This leads to another sexual encounter, and she becomes pregnant.
- Pat tries to get Perfidia to adapt to a family life on behalf of their new daughter Charlene, but she leaves to champion the French 75 cause.
- Perfidia is arrested for slaying a security guard during a French 75 bank robbery. She gives Lockjaw information on her fellow revolutionaries, which he uses to murder them. Pat, Charlene, and Perfidia all flee.
- Sixteen years pass, and now Pat has become stoned loser Bob Ferguson, helicopter dad to his daughter, who now goes by Willa. They live in Baktan Cross, CA. He’s told Willa that her mother died a heroic death when she was little.
- Lockjaw, meanwhile, has become a colonel and receives a coveted invitation to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite secret society of powerful racist reactionaries. To hide his past connection to Perfidia, he hires an assassin, Avanti Q, to start tracking down the French 75 members.
- Former French 75 member Deandra scoops up Willa before her school dance is raided by Lockjaw’s men and taken to a convent run by the awkwardly named “Sisters of the Brave Beaver.” Bob comes under attack by Lockjaw, too, but he escapes with the help of Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who’s a local pro-immigrant activist and Willa’s karate teacher. Bob flees the Lockjaw surge with Sergio and his immigrant wards, but falls and gets detained by troops. He manages to keep his identity secret.
- The Christmas Adventurers get wind of the Lockjaw-Perfidia situation and send Tim Smith, one of their members, to “clean up.”
- Lockjaw locates Willa, ties her up, and tests her DNA, confirming that he’s her father.
- Sergio frees Bob and brings him to the convent, where Bob tries and fails to shoot Lockjaw with a sniper rifle. Lockjaw, unwilling to do the deed himself, hires a heavy named Avanti to kill Willa. Avanti refuses because of her age, but consents to take her to a group of desert right-wing militants.
- Tim finds Lockjaw in the desert and plugs him in the head. Bob, racing through the desert in a stolen car, encounters the wreck of Lockjaw’s car.
- Avanti, angered by the militants’ racism, frees Willa and dies fighting the militants. Willa takes his car, but Tim spots her and PTA subjects us to a surreal montage of Bob chasing Tim chasing Willa in the desert, although sadly the action isn’t necessarily as clear as we put it here.
- Willa pulls a smart maneuver to cause Tim to crash, and shoots him when he crawls out of the wreck. Bob and Willa are reunited after a strange moment when Willa demands he say the French 75 counter-password despite seeing him in broad daylight.
- A disfigured Lockjaw gets accepted to the Christmas Club, but while waiting in “his” new office, they spray poison gas into the room and he is killed. Willa and Bob receive a letter from Perfidia, apologizing for her deeds and promising to return someday. Willa leaves their house to participate in a protest, of which Bob approves.
One Battle After Another‘s sad shortcomings
Let’s kick this off with a list, shall we?
- Not reuniting Perfidia, Pat/Bob, and Charlene/Willa in the second half of the movie. Talk about lost of dramatic energy here. I really don’t care what Thomas Pynchon wrote in his novel; Perfidia is the most dynamic force in the first half, so leaving her out of the conclusion, and failing to tie her back in with Willa, is a cinematic sin. PTA, are you listening?
- There’s a certain Monkeywrench Gang/Hunter S. Thompson vibe to the movie that gets left strangely hanging, like PTA did his best to shoehorn them into 2025 but didn’t finish connecting the dots. The attack on Otay Mesa feels strangely modern, and the action in Baktan Cross seems strangely ancient. For example, Pat berates a low-level shlub, struggling to prove his identity to the French 75 hotline, but the mere continued existence of a French 75 hotline is a headscratcher and a missed opportunity. How could this line possibly still be staffed by multiple people, 24×7? PTA, what if the French 75 hotline has become a sex chatline with an outrageous hourly rate, and Pat has to convince a bored phone hooker that he really gets access to the hidden help line? “Oh, you’d like to play naughty militant Pat Calhoun? I bet you’re good with explosives, baby.” That, my friend, is a missed opportunity. When you add up these missed opportunities, you get a dumb movie that seems oddly stuck in between eras rather than a smart movie that has brought modern elements into older source material.
- Similarly, the movie totally fails to make a moment of Willa’s decision not to divulge her parentage to Bob. This is a big emotional moment, but it goes unheralded.
- The car chase with Bob, Willa, and Tim goes on interminably and is accompanied by a fairly grating ascending-pitch soundtrack. Wasn’t this cliche in 1975? Why are we doing this in 2025? If it’s a homage, it should be a better one.
- The vibe between Bob and Willa is good but rushed for a film that’s at its core a paen to parental connections.
- After Willa kills Tim, Bob arrives and fails to give the countersign. Willa holds him at gunpoint for a long moment, which makes no sense to me. It’s clearly Bob, Willa’s dad, and they are not estranged, nor are there any visibility issues. We know Bob has been teaching Willa all her life that the password is important, but we also know that Willa has been unreceptive to his seeming paranoia. The moment, played much larger than it should be, is glaring and puzzling.
- Avanti’s decision to go rogue on the racist militia could’ve easily been clarified. A slight argument, or a tense moment, but instead Avanti’s decision is buried and minimized in a movie that is already getting heat for minimizing decisions by people of color.
- Bob’s opportunity to shoot Lockjaw is awkwardly set up. Why does Sergio want Bob to have the rifle? Is this supposed to be a lucky opportunity that Bob muffs, and why does Bob drive to the overlook instead of straight to the convent?
- The name of the monastery is a clunker. Tonally, this would be out of place in a cartoonish caper, and it grates in the context of a movie that, I’m sure, would rather be empowering than devaluing women.
- ICE is doing much worse things than Lockjaw is. Sure, Lockjaw is murdering people, but so is ICE. When real life is clearly more oppressive than your movie, the action in your movie feels dumbed down and soft.
- Leo’s not quite convincing as a burnout. This would’ve been a fun angle, but didn’t quite pay off like it should’ve.
- Why does young Lockjaw look just as ancient as old Lockjaw? Does Sean Penn have some kind of horrific allergy to latex?
- What was Sergio’s deal? He’s the raffish sidekick, but he doesn’t really do much other than move Bob to where the plot needs Bob to go.
- It’s a tad tricky to balance farcical elements with violence, realistic action, and dramatic tension, but there are some much better films that have done so successfully. I’d argue that the best of the Wes Anderson (no relation) ouvre manages it well. And of course there’s the Coen masterpiece Fargo, which has some things in common with One Battle After Another but sadly many more things in contrast.
What works in One Battle After Another
- The vibe between Willa’s friends and Bob is tangible and real. Bob’s dinosaurish paranoia jumps into vivid light in the few moments we see them together. I would’ve enjoyed seeing them all trapped in a bus or elevator, with of course some frantic action and amusing panic thrown in. “They/them – it’s not that hard!” Classic stuff.
- Similarly, the vibe between Willa and Bob is a strength. The characters have some charisma together. If this had been made a tentpole of the film, perhaps I’d be giving it a different review. I really didn’t care about much of the action. That time would’ve been better spent hearing Bob explaining his French 75 past to Willa while running from the law and trying to sabotage Lockjaw with vintage and updated tricks. Doesn’t that sound like a better film?
One Conclusion After Another
In sum, One Battle After Another alludes to greatness, buddy films, blaxsploitation classics, and ’70s rebel films without cutting new cloth. Filmmakers love to make allusions to greatness in cinema. On the other hand, someone who alludes to greatness in our society is known as a cool chaser or influencer. In ’70s parlance, such persons would be shamed as sluts, wannabes, or groupies. PTA, you’ve made a wannabe movie. Let’s try harder next time.
