EXCLUSIVE: Paul Thomas Anderson‘s most commercial movie ever, One Battle After Another, follows revolutionaries who are involved in freeing immigration encampments, robbing banks for their cause and dodging Sean Penn’s nefarious Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw.
So it comes as no surprise to hear that, regarding admissions for the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring movie, it overperformed in theaters located in blue counties (by 13%) and underperformed in red counties (by 24%), according to data from box office stat firm EntTelligence.
The comp here for One Battle After Another is R-rated non-horror movies.
One Battle After Another opened this past weekend to $22 million, a record bow for Anderson at the domestic box office and marking the 11th DiCaprio movie to open north of $20M stateside. Its global take was $48.3M.
The overall percentage of admissions attending One Battle After Another were 72% in blue-county cinemas and 27% in red-county ones. EntTelligence determines blue and red zones by how each county voted in the 2024 presidential election.
Now, it should be noted that a majority of theaters, 53%, are located in blue counties and yield 66.8% of overall movie ticket sales and 63.6% of cinema attendance.
On a Disney movie such as Snow White, which had its own controversy among right-wingers, that title did overperform in red counties, despite seeing most of its business in blue, 56% to 44%. How’s that? Because family movies generally do well in red areas, per EntTelligence.
As we told you, One Battle After Another, played well in big cities, and EntTelligence data supports that stat, reporting that 51% of the movie’s attendance was in areas with populations north of 1 million. The pic overperformed when compared to other non-horror R-rated movies in such areas by 14%. Among the cities where One Battle After Another overperformed were NYC (22% over the norm), San Francisco (+21%), Washington, DC (+26%) and Toronto (+61%). Two underperforming cities were Houston (-30%) and Dallas (-23%).
In 2015, Warner Bros had the Clint Eastwood-directed and Bradley Cooper-starring American Sniper, which became the former’s highest-grossing movie at $350.1M domestic and $547.6M global. The movie about celebrated Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle has been referred to by distribution sources as the pic that rallied the heartland, but with a superhero box office trajectory.
Arguably, in the past decade, there hasn’t been another right-wing-leaning tentpole that has played such box office levels.
