‘One Battle After Another’ Hits Peak Popularity With 97% Rotten Tomatoes Score

‘One Battle After Another’ is already being tipped for Oscar success

Warner Bros

It tends to take time to build interest in movies, even ones which seem to be sure-fire successes. In the era of social media, many movie fans want to read reviews from their counterparts rather than mainstream outlets. As a result, all but the biggest franchises usually only gain traction once they have been released. There are however exceptions to this rule and one is on the verge of release.

Called One Battle After Another, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up delusional revolutionary who lives off grid with his teenage daughter. When one of his old enemies resurfaces and his daughter is abducted, the movie turns into a game of cat and mouse with car chases aplenty as well as the involvement of militias and mysterious organizations.

The plot has a hint of 80s action extravaganza Commando but is actually loosely based on a book written by American author Thomas Pynchon. The movie hits a timely note as Pynchon is famous for sending up nefarious quasi-government organisations in his novels and director Paul Thomas Anderson continues that theme on screen. It has been seen as a political commentary and DiCaprio was a natural fit.

His role combines the paranoia he portrayed in Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator with the comedic chases from his crime comedy Catch Me If You Can. DiCaprio is supported by an equally heavyweight cast led by Benicio del Toro as his accomplice and Sean Penn as his nemesis.

One Battle After Another premiered in Los Angeles on September 8 and was met with universal acclaim. It has a critics’ rating of 97% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes but doesn’t yet have a single score from audiences as the film won’t be released until next weekend.

In contrast, there are 70 critics reviews which are almost uniformly glowing. “Drama and comedy co-exist with remarkable, virtuosic ease here,” gushes the BBC whilst Empire describes the film as “a stone-cold, instant classic” and The Times goes as far as to call it “an easy best picture Oscar nomination.”

Against the odds, even though the movie isn’t yet playing in theaters, interest in it is surging. This can be clearly seen in data from Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity of top search queries. The chart below shows that this week, One Battle After Another hit a score of 100 representing the maximum relative interest worldwide rather than the absolute number of searches.

It has been fueled by the movie’s star power, timely theme and high expectations that it could hand DiCaprio a second Academy Award for Best Actor following his gong for The Revenant in 2015. The biggest beneficiary could be Warner Bros. which is distributing the movie. It has had a string of box office successes over the summer from big budget blockbusters Superman and F1 to less likely hits like Sinners and Weapons.

The timing couldn’t have been much better as the studio’s parent Warner Bros. Discovery is reportedly the target of a takeover bid by Paramount Skydance which is controlled by David Ellison, son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Warner’s stock has surged 54% over the past month on the takeover talk and if One Battle After Another lives up to expectations it could soar even higher.