"One Battle After Another" Sneak Peek Tease: First Footage of Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Thomas Pynchon Adaptation

The first glimpse of PTA’s eagerly-anticipated Thomas Pynchon adaptation arrives ahead of next week’s full trailer drop!

If you haven’t noticed, the movie industry isn’t doing so well this year. Box office numbers over the last couple of months have hit record-breaking lows, and there’s even talk that films themselves may be losing their cultural relevance. It’s looking pretty grim.

So, is there anyone out there who can save the industry—anyone who will step up and be cinema’s savior? Well, that’s a lot of unnecessary pressure to put on any one person or even one upcoming project. But there is a movie coming out later this year that already has cinephiles buzzing—the much-anticipated pairing of celebrated filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson and Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Two major Hollywood players who have been trying to collaborate for decades are finally joining forces for the first time in their careers. And the timing couldn’t be better, as cinephiles everywhere could use something—anything—to lift their spirits. And believe us, spirits desperately need lifting.

But will it be enough to save the box office this year?

Well… probably not, considering Paul Thomas Anderson has never exactly been a box office juggernaut. But it’s still a major cinematic event that movie lovers are eagerly anticipating. And since everything else—superhero franchises, Disney blockbusters, sci-fi epics—is floundering at the moment, PTA and DiCaprio’s collaboration will just have to do.

And as much as we hate this new trend of “teasers for upcoming trailers”—where studios hype up the fact that they’ll soon be dropping a trailer for an upcoming movie—we can’t help but get excited for this 20-second sneak peek of One Battle After Another.

It’s the first-ever footage from PTA’s new film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The official trailer drops next week.

One Battle After Another is PTA’s latest adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, this time tackling Vineland. If you remember, this isn’t PTA’s first time working with the author’s writings—back in 2014, the Boogie Nights filmmaker turned the author’s classic Inherent Vice novel into a shaggy detective yarn starring Joaquin Phoenix.

In this new film, DiCaprio stars as a former 1960s counterculture radical struggling to find any relevance in mid-1980s California, all set against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s reelection.

Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall co-star, with newcomer Chase Infiniti playing Leo’s teen daughter—who might just be following in her father’s militant radical footsteps.

One Battle After Another is slated to hit theaters on September 26th. And if you ask us, that release date couldn’t come soon enough.