Why Is the Marketing for Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Movie So Weird?

You’re playing Halo on your friend’s XBOX in your college dorm. You keep getting fragged like an absolute n00b. But this time, it’s worse. The person who keeps pwning you isn’t the Master Chief that you’re used to. It’s a blocky man-child in a blue suit that has a scan of Adam Sandler’s face stretched across it. Barry Egan just wiped the floor with you, and Dean Trumbell is right behind him.

You don’t remember the Punch Drunk Love promotion where you could download character skins onto XBOX? What about Daniel Plainview getting added to Grand Theft Auto 4 as a DLC? Nothing? You don’t remember because neither idea makes much sense… and they didn’t happen. Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies don’t really lend themselves to video game tie-ins.

I would play the hell out of a video game based on a PTA film. Gimme a free-roaming adaptation of There Will Be Blood and I’ll drop $70 without blinking. But that doesn’t exist either, no matter how many letters I write. Instead, the director’s films have remained out of video games. But that’s about to change, as Warner Brothers is about to do exactly what I said doesn’t make sense.

Fortnite is going to feature character skins based on One Battle After Another, PTA’s newest film. It isn’t, like, a straight-up collaboration. It appears Warner Bros will be creating the skins themselves, and maybe a world on which players can use them? I’ve been forced to play Fortnite a punch and it is just not for me, so the specifics of this don’t make a lot of sense. But there was a trailer on TikTok, so it’s happening.

This all may be less jarring if it weren’t painfully obvious that Warner Bros. has zero idea how to market this movie. Some of the trailers have leaned into the comedic elements, while others treat it like an action-packed thriller. They could just want a proper turn on their investment, which is reportedly above $140 million, a first for PTA by a large margin, so they’re trying to cast a wide net. But it’s mostly confusing.

Paul Thomas Anderson is no stranger to mixing tones and genres. One Battle After Another, a film about ex-revolutionaries escaping an old enemy, could be all the things it’s being sold as. It may also be weirder. PTA is no stranger to that, either. And it’s almost safe to assume that the film will be somewhat weird, given recent comments from one Stephen Spielberg.

The director of 1941 was a part of a post-screening panel for the movie and claimed he had already seen it three times. He called it bizarre and relevant, praised the action, and even compared the thing to freaking Dr. Strangelove!

“I have not seen a movie that is so tonally a relative to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove,” Spielberg explained. “This brings a kind of absurdist comedy, taken very seriously, because it’s so much a reflection of what’s happening today, every day, throughout this country. But it takes it to a point where you want to laugh, because if you don’t laugh, you’re going to start screaming, ‘This is too real.’”

There’s more from Spielberg that you can read here, but he may have inadvertently explained why the marketing for this thing is so insane. It sounds like it has a hell of a lot going on, and I haven’t even gotten into how it’s a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland! I— no. Forget it. It’s an action comedy. I’m sorry, Warner Bros, this was harder than I thought.