Billboard Women in Music 2025
Warner Bros’ kicked off its CinemaCon presentation with its two biggest swings yet — Paul Thomas Anderson’s $140M rebel Leonardo DiCaprio feature, One Battle After Another, and then followed it up with a look at Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!
It was a smart and shrewd move by Warner Bros motion picture co-chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy who’ve been under fire for making those audacious titles at lofty budgets. They wanted to show exhibs the goods, how great these pics are — mission accomplished.
DiCaprio showed up with his co-stars Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor.
“I wanted to work for Paul for 20 years now,” said DiCaprio (his father co-starred in Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.
Continued the Oscar winner about Anderson, “He tapped into something politically and culturally that is right beneath our psyche. It’s an incredible epic movie that has such scope and scale.” DiCaprio praised Anderson for how he works with actors, and “let’s us improvise” and allows the thespians to create their charactres and fold it into the filmmaker’s narrative.
In the fresh extended footage shown, DiCaprio’s former yippie Bob is seen negotiating with a difficult underground rebel contact who knows the whereabouts of his daughter (played by Chase Infiniti). This all goes down in the apartment of Benecio del Toro’s character, Bob’s friend; the guy searching around the apartment for a sniper rifle.
Hall plays Deandra, and Taylor plays Profidia, “She’s a mess….she loves hard and betrays hard. She has a lot going on. People mean well, but she is a situation-ship. She’s an egg, scrambled eggs. She’s tough on the outside, she’s always in survival mode and she’s selfish.”
Hall and Taylor didn’t reveal their connections to DiCaprio’s protag during the session.
The movie, which was shot in Imax, was recently moved from Aug. 8 to Sept. 29 as PTA is still working on the film; also to secure Imax auditoriums.
The movie which in its look and style has a throwback to such ’70s action movies as Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit and Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way But Loose is inspired by the Thomas Pynchon 1990 novel Vineland.
DiCaprio will play Bob Ferguson, who was part of a rebellion group known as the French 75. In the first trailer that dropped recently, Bob is trying to find his daughter.
Pic also stars Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn and Chase Infiniti in the cast.
