One Box Office Battle After Another for PTA

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1:11Or they think they do. Because though they have the same name, they've got a whole new energy. They kept the global icon status and upgraded pretty much everything else. We're talking modern rooms with real reset mode vibes, spaces that feel like your living room, just a little more low-key chic, and dining done right, from breakfast to dinner and drinks. Whether you're traveling for work or getting away for a minute, it's comfort that hits different. So yeah, Holiday Inn. It's a new day and a new stay. Book your next day at HolidayInn.com. It is Monday, September 29th. Of all the movies on the 2025 theatrical slate, one battle after another was maybe the most anticipated for the town.

1:52Not just because it's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie with a major star in Leo DiCaprio and a budget that far surpasses anything he's ever worked with. Even Warner Brothers admits the movie cost$130 million. Most sources peg it higher than that. It's also yet another referendum on the strategy at Warner Brothers under Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi of spending big money on auteur, filmmaker-driven original projects with big stars. So this weekend, One Battle After Another opened, and it did okay? Not great? Question mark? 22.4 million domestic, about 48, 48.5 million worldwide. On one hand, it's the biggest opening of PTA's career, a great number for an R-rated political satire dramedy.

2:33And the reviews and exit scores are all very strong, indicating it should hold pretty well. It also did great on IMAX and PLF screens, almost 50 % of the revenue coming from those. On the other hand, once again, film Twitter may not be real life. This is the lowest opening for a DiCaprio movie since J. Edgar in 2011, if we adjust for inflation. And it came in behind Killers of the Flower Moon, Leo's last movie, which was three and a half hours. This says he's a much bigger lure than PTA. So what does this opening tell us about the state of the filmmaker maker-driven blockbuster wannabe. Bigger picture, what about the larger studio politics at Warner Brothers?

3:11Mike and Pam's 2025 slate is now finished, actually. Eleven movies, nine of them opened at number one for Warners, and one battle after another comes after a pretty remarkable run starting in April with Minecraft, Sinners, Final Destination, F1, Superman, Weapons, The Conjuring, all of them profitable, and a few of them despite some pretty significant risks. But Warners will now go almost five months without a movie. News broke recently that the studio could be acquired by David Ellison, which would put it under the same ownership as Paramount. Warners is definitely the most interesting studio right now, so today it's the one battle after another box office discourse with our Monday guy, Lucas Shaw, how this movie lands in the bigger studio narrative.

3:53Plus, we'll do a little on the latest Trump tariff noise as well. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

4:04Okay, we are here with Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg, who is back once again. Lucas, you have not been promoting your big upcoming event on this platform. I rely on you to feather me. That is the goal. I have been delinquent in that. Your screen time? Screen time, October 8th and 9th. If there is a prominent person in the entertainment business, I have either interviewed them there or will do that this year. We have some of your favorites. Yeah, I saw you've got David Ellison. you've got Mike and Pam from Warner Brothers. We got Ryan Coogler. We got Ryan Coogler. Good one. I'm sure he has some thoughts on our discussion of his movie on this, on this show.

4:42I think they were, they appreciated it. Yeah. Okay. Not the discussion of his deal. I'm sure, but no, I think they're, they don't want me to ask too many questions about that. If we can avoid it. Okay. That's fine. But yeah, October 8th, the 9th, your big event. The food is excellent. I can't recommend it enough. All right. Enough plugging. Enough plugging. Warner Brothers. We're talking about one of these signatures of their 2025 slate, one battle after another. I feel like we talk about this subject at the risk of enraging every film bro and entertainment industry person who really wants this movie to succeed and was going all at it the week leading up to it.

5:23Anytime the big boast is that it's the record for a filmmaker, when the filmmaker has never made a hit movie is... Don't get me wrong. Great filmmaker, but not a commercial one. It's shameful. I want to sit all the filmmakers down and do like a airplane style slap across the face for all of them. Okay. $22.4 million for the opening weekend. $48.5 million for the global total. We don't have the actuals yet. Maybe that will go up. Maybe it'll go down. We can round it and call it 50. Sure. Great. Call it 50. For a movie that you're reporting says costs$140 million, Warner's is copying to$130 million.

6:07I have heard that it's like$145 million. Let's put it at$140. That's not great. This movie has to gross about$300 million to be considered a success. More, really. Yeah, given the marketing, let's say$300 million is the bar. and we went through this with Sinners. I know that Sinners ended up legging out and ended up being a profitable movie, but the indication here from the numbers is that this is not Sinners. First of all, Sinners cost$40 to$50 million less, which makes a huge difference. I had people telling me like, oh, it's the same opening as Sinners and Weapons, and first of all, that's not quite right, but also those movies cost considerably less than this.

6:48Also, it's a vampire movie. Sinners was a commercial genre this movie is supposed to have international appeal because of Leo but it didn't the subject matter is so US centric in a way I don't know we're going to set aside our opinions of the caliber of the movie that is for other people people come at me all the time like oh you hate quality no I don't I love this movie when I saw it but we're not talking about that we're not talking about how great it is only in respect to it could have legs the cinema score was an A the post track ratings were good to your point when we say this the film people come after us and say we're denigrating art or we're too simple-minded.

7:24We just care about commerce. And sure, it's more fun to analyze the movie than to deal with facts. There's a million other shows that do that. But calling it a flop or maybe it's not a flop, certainly at least not at this point, but calling it a movie that's probably not going to make money in theaters, its value will be sort of as a long-term asset title, doesn't mean it's a bad movie. It just means that the studio and director failed or are struggling to succeed at a very specific but important part of the job, which is to make money on the project. These studios don't make these movies as art benefactors, right?

7:59They don't fund movies to be cool. They fund movies to make money, and being cool is a nice bonus. And they would argue that the ancillary value of having a movie like this is that it gets them into the high-end talent business in a way that maybe when this movie was greenlit, Warners was struggling to attract high-level filmmakers. They had had Nolan defect, and this movie will go a long way towards people respecting the studio again. But David Zasloff's not in this for the respect. David Zasloff is in this to justify the expenditure on the movie. And yes, I'm sure he will be there on Oscar night if it gets a bunch of Oscar nominations and they will put money into a campaign to try to win best picture.

8:42But you got to look at whether the cost justifies the outcome. And we don't know yet. It's going to have a really uphill battle. What I don't get, and I've never understood about this movie, because like Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the great auteurs of this century, I do think that some film people forgive mistakes or projects that aren't as great from people like PTA people like Sorsese just because they are that name. They just assume that everything they do is genius. I don't understand giving him$140 million or$135 million when he's never had a movie gross$100. It's a bet. It's a risk. And you see this movie and like, yeah, it's got some scale to it.

9:26And I get that Leo is a big star, but you see that and I didn't walk out being like, well, that's going to be a big box office hit. No, but you did walk out thinking it was a good movie. and you know that helps what I think you're saying is that this movie opened to about where it should be expected to open to if this movie costs 60 million dollars to produce great you got a single and it's going to win a bunch of awards and maybe then it'll have like a really big afterlife and then you've gotten exactly what you want but is the Leo quote worth it when he's like not the best part of the movie and it didn't open big overseas well that's why they justify it they say we can do this with Leo.

10:06And, you know, it opened about to what Killers of the Flower Moon did a little bit under that. Now, that is Scorsese, who is a much more proven box office draw. And maybe this movie has legs because of the quality. But Leo, I think, did matter here. I think it got to where it got to in part because of Leo. Yeah. Oh, I mean, without Leo, it probably doesn't open to 50 million worldwide. Yeah. We did get some tracking data. This movie performed much better in big cities. New York City overperformed the most. The two underperforming cities were Houston and Dallas, and they way underperformed. Not a surprise there.

10:45There was also some data that was released today showing that one battle after another performed much better in blue country cinema. 72 % of the admissions were from blue country cinemas. That's where counties voted in the 2024 presidential election for Democrats. Not a surprise there. This was a bi-coastal big city phenomenon. The question is, will it be able to expand out? Can they take this A Cinema score and some of these numbers in the big cities and expand it out and turn this into a movie that love it or hate it, you have to see to be part of the conversation. Yeah. There was a variety of pieces.

11:28What happened with Sinners? Yeah, it happened with Sinners, but there was a variety piece this weekend that was like, oh, this is the talking point that America needs. I don't think America is talking about this movie. It's not. I saw that piece and laughed. That's such a LA-centric view of what people are talking about. It's not even on Fox News' radar because it's not something that is enough to make people outraged. Paul Thomas Anderson has been working on this idea for a long time. It feels incredibly of the moment because it is a film about, among many, many other things, sort of extremist political factions.

12:05Immigration and like, yeah, revolutionaries. Yeah. But it has not become part of the culture war. There's not, for one reason or another, it has not become this really controversial touchstone. In a way, in a weird way, where like Sinners had a little bit of that, both because of its sort of It's racial commentary, but also because of like that sort of big fuss about the deal that Ryan Coogler struck with Warner Brothers. Yeah. And Coogler is a much more commercial director. The dude directed Black Panther. Right. And Creed. And Creed. Yeah. It's just an entirely different thing. Let's talk about the larger Warner's issue here.

12:44The narrative on Warner's this year obviously has been extraordinary. They have nine movies now that have opened in a row at number one. it's interesting because warners doesn't have another movie this year they're crazy it's crazy no one is reporting on they're going to go five months almost between movie releases this is the last movie until weathering heights in the middle of february i have a theory on why it happened but it's just crazy that this happened well they managed the schedule really well it's schedule management. Yeah. The movies that they released this year, for the most part, were sure things or low risk bets, right?

13:31Or good movies. They knew they were at least good movies. Right. So one interesting thing that I looked up, because I've been doing some prep for interviewing Mike and Pam, if you look, because this year for horror has been kind of choppy, right? But Warner Brothers has the four highest grossing horror movies of the year. They're the only studio that has had horror movies gross more than$100 million. Final Destination, Conjuring, Conjuring, and Sinners. And Sinners, if you count it. And then they have their two auteur movies in Sinners and One Battle After Another where, to your point, even if they don't hit the numbers that they want them to, they know that they've made a good movie and they're, like, fine getting chastised for poor performance.

14:11And then they have the tent poles. Minecraft, which, you know, was a little bit of a question mark, but opened, obviously. Superman, which is technically not Mike and Pam's. And then they have the distribution on F1. And then any risky stuff they've sort of moved to next year. Yeah, they moved the Mortal Kombat sequel to next year. They moved the Maggie Gyllenhaal movie, The Bride, to next year. They have the Inu Ritu movie with Tom Cruise that technically wasn't delayed, but I think the original plan was to have that a little earlier. There is nothing for the holidays. There's nothing later in the fall.

14:45And that, I think, is intentional. I've heard that Gunner, the CFO of Warner Discovery, basically said, we have too many risks in this year. So let's punt to 2026. This company is in a very interesting and some would say perilous situation where there's now there's a plan to split the company into two. That's going to require a sales pitch to Wall Street. There is now a potential bid coming for the entire company from David Ellison and his family, which could lead to Warner Brothers being merged or at least owned by the same company as Paramount. And I just think they similar to what Bob Iger did at Disney when he was fighting the activist shareholder.

15:30He just said, you know what, if it's a risk, if it's LEO, if it's something that we don't think is a sure thing, just punt it to next year and we'll deal with it then. I don't think that the schedule management of that had anything to do with the Ellison deal you don't? No because those decisions were made way before then obviously they knew that there was a chance that they would be in play it may have had something to do with I mean to your point about the narrative the crazy part about it has been that before Minecraft and Sinners opened it was David Zaslav was sort of openly flirting with replacing them and reaching out to potential replacements and then they go on this heater and that that conversation dies down.

16:09It dies down, but I've heard it hasn't totally gone away. The relationship between them, I think, is still a little frosty. Yeah. It's like when you're arguing with a girlfriend and you say things that you later regret and can the relationship survive even though you make up. Or it's sort of, God, what is that great movie where the family's at the ski chalet and the husband, Force Majeure, and the avalanche comes and the husband just abandons them. Right. And then he and his wife, it's like, How do you come back from that? Right. That's exactly what happened here. It's like, if you're Mike and Pam, you basically have a middle finger to your boss saying, oh, you were going to replace us?

16:45We just went on one of the greatest heaters in modern Hollywood history. But maybe he still does replace them because you can't have a conversation anymore. Yeah. I don't know how real that is. Everybody in Hollywood secretly hates each other. So maybe they just grin and bear it. And if this Paramount thing is really going to happen, nobody's going to replace the studio chiefs in the middle of it. So although if that does happen, I can't imagine Mike and Pam reporting to Dana Goldberg at Paramount. That is not going to happen, right? No, I cannot imagine that either. But the truth is, is that if the two of them really had to, I think they'd be happy to produce.

17:22Oh, I don't think they want to give up that job. I think you get that chairman job and you stick to that until they drag you out of there. Until they rip it out of your hand.

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18:20Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. To learn more, check out Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah, it's interesting that Warners will only have released 11 movies in U.S. theaters this year. And as great as the year has been for them, got to$4 billion before others, they are not back to the pre-pandemic levels. I mean, pre-pandemic, they were consistently releasing more than 18, sometimes 20 movies a year.

19:02and the theater community has certainly noticed that. And I reported this past week that the Ellison plan, if they do get Warners, is at least at the beginning to do 15 movies for theaters from Warners per year. But do we have any indication that the David Zasloff-led Warner Discovery wants to get back to that 15 or more a year cadence on movies? I feel like they've said that their goal is sort of 12 to 15. right? Yeah, they've said it, but you know, Amazon said that five years ago and we haven't seen it yet. They're ramping up. It's hard. I know it's hard. They have a very diverse slate next year.

19:42It's a very interesting slate because there's no Superman. There's nothing like automatically gigantic. Other than the third Dune movie, which comes at the end of the year. And is legendary. Yeah. There's nothing that you look at and are confident it will work, right? Like they're DC movies. They have Supergirl, which could work. Heard good things. They have Clayface. I've literally never heard of Clayface. I'm not, you know, they have an Iñárritu movie, which he does make really good movies, but not always the most commercial. Oh, how dare you? Tom Cruise. Come on, man. Sorry. They have a mummy movie and I feel like people keep trying with the mummy and it's not totally, it hasn't worked.

20:22Yeah, I know. And then they've got some risky stuff. The Bride. They've got Animal Friends, which is a legendary movie that Andy Serkis directed. It's kind of CG animated. And then they have a lot of horror. So that's worked for them. But they do have a family movie for next holiday is Cat in the Hat. But how many times can they do that? Don't know. All right. Big picture on Warners. If you're David Zaslaw and you can go back in a time machine when maybe now with the benefit of a little more knowledge about the film business, do you let Mike and Pam greenlight the PTA movie? I don't know enough about the negotiation.

21:02at the time to understand if that budget was absolutely necessary. I think if you're telling me you have a Paul Thomas Anderson movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, like, yeah, I want to release that movie. He's a modern master. No, no, no. But I'm saying with the reviews and the opening weekend and where we are right now. My primary question is, could you have made it for, forget 60, like, could you have made it for 100? You know, maybe if you made this in Morocco and not California, but it's got a particular look to it. It helps the movie. My point is like, is this a overall good movie for Warner Brothers to have?

21:45A extremely well-reviewed, best picture contender? Yes, considering everything else that they have had this year, it's a no-brainer. You have a movie from a great contemporary filmmaker that's gotten good reviews, that is going to be a real contender. You now, between this and Sinners, have two heavy contenders at the Oscars. And if you can go in and PTA can get his Oscar, then you call it a win and decide that your other successes have covered the cost of doing it. Look, if you're running a movie studio, you have to be willing to take a couple of big swings. I reiterate that this movie, if they had been able to make it for less, we don't even have to have this stupid conversation and it'd be fine.

22:28But you're willing to bite the bullet on that because of everything else that worked. Now, had Sinners not worked and both of these had not worked, then it's tougher. But I think because Sinners was such a success, you're willing to take... They both got great reviews. One of them was a commercial hit. One of them, not so much. but like is still a nice thing to have in your library. You're not getting fired. That is the overall worry of studio executives. Is this movie going to get me fired? And I don't think one battle after another is going to get anybody fired. It's a quality movie. It's going to get a ton of Oscars.

23:03It's the same way that like we talked, you brought up Killers of the Flower Moon, right? With Apple. The problem... Oh, but Apple's a whole different... They don't need to make money. No, I know. But they had Killers of the Flower Moon and they had Napoleon and they were both like, you know, they didn't do as well as they would have hoped. But the real pressure came after the Matthew Vaughn movie, right? Because they're like, oh, you want to give a bunch of money to Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott? We can't really fault you for that. You want to give a bunch of money to Matthew Vaughn to make a mediocre movie that also doesn't do well?

23:35Now we have problems. Right. Yeah. Although Apple doesn't have $30 billion in debt that Warner Discovery does. But the funny thing is that this movie is considered some, you know, gigantic positive for Warner Brothers. When you look at Mickey 17, the Bong Joon-ho movie from earlier this year that Warner Brothers absolutely ran away from, that movie cost less than this movie. That movie cost about$120, and it grossed almost the same in its opening weekend, about$19 million, this movie, a little bit higher. And you would have thought that that movie was going to bring down the studio. People were going nuts about it so much.

24:14another auteur I mean Bong Bong arguably means more to the international box office than PTA does for this movie right and not that this is the be all and end all but Bong directed a movie that won best picture which I think PTA still weirdly has not he has actually never won an Oscar I think that PTA gets treated with kinder gloves by the press than any other working filmmaker and it they contrarian in me it drives me fucking nuts and I need to like know that about myself and reign it in. Because he appeals to middle-aged white men executives. Isn't that the reason? And look, he's made some great, great movies, but he's also made some movies that I don't want to watch again.

24:56Inherent Vice, not going to be a rewatchable. I know, but good for him. People love this movie, and I hope it can leg out. Yeah. All right, let's move on. I want to briefly mention the Trump tariff nonsense because we got another post this morning from the president saying that the movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, just like stealing candy from a baby. I don't know what the quotes are around that. California, with its weak and incompetent governor, has been particularly hit hard, yada, yada, yada. So 100 % tariffs on this. Here we go again. This is not a thing.