Summer’s over, it’s getting dark earlier, and the pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio sunning his belly on yachts have been replaced in our feeds by videos of Leo dutifully fulfilling his publicity obligations for his latest expensive drama from an auteur filmmaker. One Battle After Another is yet another prestige project for which DiCaprio was paid more than $25 million and will be the primary reason regular people pay to see it in theaters.

Leo rarely does solo press—even for his Esquire cover story that kicked off this promo cycle, he was interviewed not by a journalist but by his own director, Paul Thomas Anderson. But the plan is for DiCaprio to be out there a little more for this movie, which premiered in L.A. on Monday, nearly three weeks before its September 26 release via Warner Bros. Lots of time to drum up interest and raise the current opening weekend tracking, which is sitting at what would be a pretty disastrous $20 million, according to NRG.

No worries, right? Leo is still the unicorn… right? The industry decided a while back that DiCaprio, and pretty much only DiCaprio, can front a $150 million political satire like One Battle After Another (Warners says $130 million to $140 million, some say far more than that), with a running time of 2 hours and 40 minutes and coming from a filmmaker who has never made a movie that grossed more than $76 million, not adjusted for inflation. Starting with Titanic in 1997, Leo has made 20 movies for theaters and grossed more than $7 billion. His worldwide haul—not including Don’t Look Up, for which Netflix paid him about $35 million to forgo a big theatrical release—has averaged about $350 million per movie. Averaged. And hits like The Revenant ($532 million) and Inception ($840 million) were not easy sells. At the same time, his list of collaborators—Scorsese, Nolan, Spielberg, Tarantino, Cameron, Iñárritu, Luhrmann, Eastwood, Boyle, Mendes, Zwick, and now P.T.A.—reads like an extended Mount Rushmore for the Letterboxd crowd. DiCaprio has still never done a superhero movie or a sequel, and he’s among the highest-grossing actors of all time. It’s downright heroic.

But is Leo still the unicorn? Is that kind of star power even possible today? Killers of the Flower Moon, his most recent team-up with Scorsese, grossed just $158 million worldwide in 2023, though its running time pushed three and a half hours. Before that, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood failed to crack $400 million, and that had Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. DiCaprio is 50 now and looks it, hardly the pretty boy leading man that endeared him to so many Titanic fans. He eschews social media and off-cycle press. And while his manager, Rick Yorn (he still has no agent), had lined up several possible projects to shoot this summer—from Damien Chazelle’s Evel Knievel movie to a couple possible Scorsese reteams—none of them actually happened. Instead, Leo went to Europe with his girlfriend and partied all summer. Can’t say I blame him.

So, to check whether Leo’s appeal is still as strong, I asked Greenlight Analytics, an industry polling and data-crunching firm, to conduct a little study. The results were encouraging but showed a few weak spots. DiCaprio’s overall awareness was strong at 86 percent, which is in the 99th percentile of the 972 actors tracked by the company. He has a big “fandom” score of 60 percent—essentially, people are asked if they are a fan of his—and his “Will see in theaters” number (37 percent) is good. His strongest traits were “good actor” (71 percent), “likable” (61 percent), and “authentic” (58 percent). His weakest traits were “sexy” (42 percent), “trendy” (48 percent), and “overrated” (23 percent, which was on the higher end of the actors polled).

These numbers are pretty consistent across genders and age groups, but they overindex with both women and men over 35. In fact, his “theatrical intent” with the under-35 crowd—meaning they would pay to see him in a theater—was lower than with the older cohorts. Makes sense, given his age and the kind of movies he makes.

Bill Skelly, whose team ran the numbers for me at Greenlight, told me that DiCaprio “remains one of the most respected actors in the world and is synonymous with prestige cinema.” But, he noted, “theatrical audiences, however, are more distracted and selective than they once were. Leo is still a major draw, but in today’s box office landscape the definition of ‘biggest movie star’ and how audiences are searching for entertainment has evolved significantly.”

True. So to get a better idea of his place in the firmament, I asked Skelly to compare Leo to a competitive set of male movie stars who performed well in recent polls and have released non-I.P.-driven movies recently: Timothée Chalamet, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Dwayne Johnson, Michael B. Jordan, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington. Some findings:

So, what’s the big takeaway? The numbers suggest DiCaprio remains Hollywood’s most valuable combination of respected actor and box office draw. We can debate whether Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy at Warner Bros. should greenlight any prestige drama at such a high price, but if you’re gonna do it, do it with Leo. Still, as he ages and commercial tastes evolve, his box office pull increasingly looks different from mass appeal stars like The Rock, who are willing to play second fiddle to I.P., or even other steady, trusted draws like Denzel. Leo may need to couple a prestige play like One Battle After Another with a more mainstream genre movie (Inception) or A-list co-stars (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) while also trying to juice interest among younger audiences. His legacy is secure, but his future drawing power may depend on either stepping outside the prestige sandbox or mixing and matching needed added-value elements within it.

See you Monday,
Matt

Correction: Sanford Panitch is 57, not 59, as Kim mentioned on Monday. Apologies.

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a good name for the combined Paramount/Warner Bros.? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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