Warner Bros. has decided that the best way to market Paul Thomas Anderson’s $150+ million “One Battle After Another” is… by putting it in Fortnite.
We’ve officially entered the phase of the Oscar campaign where strategy becomes performance art. For those keeping track at home, PTA is essentially sharing a digital stage with Ariana Grande, John Wick, and Goku. Hey, whatever drives ticket sales.
Marketing a Paul Thomas Anderson film to 11-year-old iPad kids is certainly a choice, one that suggests Warner Bros. has officially hit the panic button on this one. The film has a bloated budget it might not claw its way out of. Might as well go all out.
Let’s not forget, PTA’s highest-grossing film (“There Will Be Blood”) topped out at just under $80M worldwide. And yet, somehow, Warner Bros. handed him almost double that just for the budget on “One Battle After Another.”
I just love how Anderson somehow managed to convince Warners to give him $150M+ to direct a Thomas Pynchon adaptation. Did they even know the plot was loosely based on Pynchon’s “Vineland”? Maybe not. I can definitely imagine a scenario where PTA initially pitched the project to Warners without mentioning Pynchon’s name a single time.
At a recent test screening of “One Battle After Another,” I was told that nearly all of Warner Bros.’ post-screening questions weren’t about the film’s content, performances, or pacing — but about how, exactly, they should market it. In other words, the studio wasn’t gauging how the movie plays so much as trying to crowdsource a strategy for selling a film that defies easy categorization.
For the record, I hope it works. A big-budget PTA success could mean more ambitious swings from him, and from studios willing to take those risks. No one is rooting for this to tank. Cinephiles are thrilled PTA got a blank check to make whatever the hell this is. But if Warner Bros. really believed this film could stand on its own legs… would we be talking about a Fortnite tie-in right now?
