There’s a difference, of course, between a film becoming a “success” vs. a “success d’estime.”
A cinematic success is one that not only pleases the Movie Godz but attracts and perhaps even excites your entertainment-seeking, less-than-progressive types, and which at least breaks even financially…a film that connects with both the mineral-water, chamomile tea-sipping cultural elites and the under-educated, soft-drink-slurping, popcorn-eating sloths.
A success d’estime tends to connect with the former, and less so the latter. A 9.30 Ankler column by “Prestige Junkie’s”‘s Katey Rich doesn’t admit this. Calling OBAA a flat-out “success” is cheerleader spin.
As far as it goes, HE remains a sincere fan of One Battle After Another. Pic deserves between four and five gold stars for craft alone, but there’s only so much love this suburban New Jersey guy can give to a woke action flick that dismisses white establishment males as racist and predatory and pretty much incapable of social compassion.
I’m genuinely glad and enthused that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film, which should have cost $40 or $50 million to produce, tops, but wound up costing $140M-plus due to massive salaries and whatnot…I’m glad it’s been greeted with gushing critical enthusiasm thus far, and it’s a foregone conclusion, of course, that it’ll be Oscar-nominated in several categories.
But it won’t, I suspect, win the Best Picture Oscar. For one thing, Academy voters don’t like celebrating big-budget shortfallers.
Will the 55-year-old PTA (whom I first met in early ’97 when he dropped by for an interview following a HotShot Movies screening of Hard Eight) snag a Best Director Oscar? As a kind of career-tribute, gold-watch gesture, I mean. And as a way of symbolically dismissing Trump and the MAGA millions. Maybe, maybe not.
The key factor is that OBAA is not and never will be a commercial “hit”. If you add in marketing costs it’ll need to reap…what, half a billion just to break even? PTA’s There Will Be Blood was his highest earner at $77M. OBAA will surpass that, I’m presuming, but it won’t come near $500M. Hell, the theatrical take probably won’t make much more than $100M. Am I wrong?
How is One Battle After Another performing in Charlie Kirk country? That’s what I’d like to know. How it is playing outside the urban liberal-media bubble?
Yesterday Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro, leaning on data from Entelligence, reported that “the overall percentage of admissions attending One Battle After Another were 72% in blue-county cinemas and 27% in red-county ones.” He explains that EntTelligence “determines blue and red zones by how each county voted in the 2024 presidential election.”
D’Alessandro: “53% of the nation’s movie theaters are located in blue counties and yield 66.8% of overall movie ticket sales and 63.6% of cinema attendance.”
