‘One Battle After Another’ Wins Best Picture, Comedy or Musical, at 2026 Golden Globes

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” has won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Comedy or Musical, cementing itself as a true Oscar frontrunner as the race heats up.

The win comes one week after the film took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards, and on a night that also saw it win Best Screenplay and Best Director for Anderson and Best Supporting Actress for Teyana Taylor.

While the film was an overwhelming critical success (IndieWire named it the best film of 2025), it wasn’t long ago that it was considered a massive risk for Warner Bros. and studio heads Pamela Abdy and Michael de Luca. The nine-figure budget was by far the highest of Anderson’s career, and placing such a big bet on a beloved auteur who had never been seen as a box office juggernaut prompted speculation about Abdy and de Luca’s job security. But like almost everything else Warner Bros. released in 2025, it paid off in droves. The film is now firmly in the pole position for the Oscars, and Abdy and de Luca signed an extension to continue running the studio.

“Vaguely abstracted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1984-set ‘Vineland’ but eager to reflect a variety of post-Reaganite advancements in ethno-fascism (the action starts in a recognizable today before jumping 16 years forward into a pointedly unchanged tomorrow), this propulsive, hilarious, and overwhelmingly tender paranoid comedy-thriller car chase blockbuster whatever doesn’t just stare a broken country in the face with its already prescient tale of immigrant detention centers, white nationalist caricatures, and bullshit pretenses for deploying the military into sanctuary cities,” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Critic’s Pick review of the film. “It’s also the first movie of its size to accurately crystallize how fucking anxious it feels to be alive right now — to capture the IMAX cartoonishness of our reality and provide a convincing roadmap as to how we might survive it.”

The Comedy or Musical category is always loosely defined at the Golden Globes, with many movies that audiences might label as dramas slipping into the category for a better shot at winning. This year was no exception, with a diverse field that included Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” and Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice.”

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