About There Will Be Blood
Daniel Plainview, an Edwardian silver miner who claws his way into California oil, comes to a small ranching town that happens to sit on a sea of crude — and to a young preacher who happens to want it for his own purposes. Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! ends in a bowling alley and never quite leaves you.
Released in 2007 and running a tight 2h 38m, There Will Be Blood sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. There Will Be Blood is part of that pipeline. If you have responded to this film, the director's other available titles in our catalog are listed in the sidebar; Paul Thomas Anderson's filmography rewards sustained attention.
Cast
The principal cast — Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch There Will Be Blood
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Portland, OR — listed at 4 independent cinemas.
- Philadelphia, PA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Kansas City, MO — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Barbara, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- New York, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Campbell, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Salt Lake City, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Lake Oswego, OR — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Caro, MI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Millbury, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. There Will Be Blood is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 38m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.