Leonardo DiCaprio Teases 'Incredibly Epic' New Movie at CinemaCon
Leonardo DiCaprio praised his upcoming film One Battle After Another and its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, at CinemaCon 2025 on Tuesday (via Variety).
DiCaprio stars in Anderson’s incredibly secretive film alongside Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Alana Haim. While the plot is still under wraps, reports indicate the film may be a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Anderson, the acclaimed filmmaker behind Boogie Nights (1997), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), and Licorice Pizza (2021), previously adapted Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice into a 2015 film of the same name starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, and del Toro.
Speaking at the Las Vegas event on Tuesday, DiCaprio called One Battle After Another "an incredibly epic movie [that] has such scope and scale." He also called Anderson a “master” director and praised the filmmaker’s confidence in his cast, allowing them to improvise in character. "A lot of writer-directors are incredibly rigid, but his ability to work with actors is so unique," DiCaprio noted, adding that working with Anderson was an “honor.”
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“I’ve been wanting to work with Paul for, gosh, 20 years now,” DiCaprio continued. “With this film, he’s tapped into something politically and culturally that’s burning beneath our psyche.”
Variety described footage of the film shared at CinemaCon as “off-beat [and] often hilarious,” citing one particularly outrageous scene in which DiCaprio’s substance-abusing revolutionary struggles to recall information pivotal to his mission. “I fried my brain,” DiCaprio’s character tells another. “I have abused drugs and alcohol for the past 30 years. I am a drug and alcohol lover…This is not the way revolutionaries do s--t.”
DiCaprio’s union with Anderson is a long time coming. The director cast DiCaprio’s father, well-known Los Angeles personality George DiCaprio, in his previous film Licorice Pizza as the owner of a waterbed store. One Battle After Another, which Anderson shot in VistaVision for IMAX screens, is due in cinemas on Sept. 26, 2025. You can check out the trailer below.