Less than 24 hours after Warner Bros announced they had pushed back the release date for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film to late September – with an eye, suggested pundits, on teeing up its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, for a second Oscar – a first trailer for One Battle After Another has arrived.
The brief teaser foregrounds the characters played by DiCaprio and co-star Teyana Taylor, who are are seen avidly practising gun combat.
The film is Anderson’s most expensive to date, with an estimated $140m production budget. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, an experimental postmodern fiction in which characters in 1984 California flashback to the 60s, it is Anderson’s second adaptation of his works, following 2014’s Inherent Vice.
One of the stars of that film, Benicio Del Toro, also features in One Battle After Another, alongside Licorice Pizza co-stars Alana Haim and Sean Penn.
The film is DiCaprio’s first since Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. He won the leading actor Oscar in 2015 for The Revenant.
