One Battle After Another's Adam Somner Tribute Explained

If you saw Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" or caught it streaming on HBO Max, you may have noticed a tribute to Adam Somner and wondered who that man might be. Somner, who passed away on November 27, 2024, was a producer on this film and plenty of other great works of art, and his collaborators wanted to honor his memory with this touching dedication.

Various entertainment outlets, including Variety, reported on Somner's passing; he died at the age of 57 due to anaplastic thyroid cancer. Throughout Somner's career, the British director — who got his start as a first assistant director in 2003 thanks to the spoof film "Johnny English" — worked on a whole host of incredible movies, including multiple films with Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. Somner served as an assistant director, producer, or both on movies like "The Master," "There Will Be Blood," "Inherent Vice," "Phantom Thread," and "Licorice Pizza" with Anderson, "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Killers of the Flower Moon" with Scorsese, and "Munich," "The Adventures of TinTin," "Bridge of Spies," "The Post," and "West Side Story" with Spielberg. Somner also worked with other legendary directors like Ridley Scott, Steve McQueen, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

In that Variety article, Anderson spoke glowingly of Somner:

"Adam loved making films more than anyone else ever in the history of the movie business. It was food and drink to him. He made everyone who worked with him feel safe. He saw everything from all sides at once and had a back up plan to the back up plan to the back up plan. He moved mountains and trucks and people like he was moving a salt shaker across a table. It was glorious to watch him work."

"One Battle After Another" is Adam Somner's final film and was released posthumously, nearly a year after his passing ... and even though Somner's resumé is full of genuinely great movies that will serve as his legacy, it feels poignant and fitting that Paul Thomas Anderson's most celebrated film in recent memory is Somner's swan song. Not only that, but "One Battle After Another" is a striking, engrossing, and vital story about the fight for righteousness and good in the world and how we can share that fight with younger generations and encourage them to pick up the reins after we're tired or gone, providing an all-too-fitting message for Somner's last movie as a producer and assistant director.

In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio, turning in his best performance since "The Wolf of Wall Street," plays Bob Ferguson, a man once known to his friends and fellow revolutionaries as "Pat" who goes on the run with his infant daughter after his anti-fascist group finds themselves directly targeted by government forces. When Bob's daughter Willa (outstanding newcomer Chase Infiniti) turns 16 years old, one of those government goons, Sean Penn's Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, starts hunting her down ... because after a forced sexual encounter with Bob's partner and Willa's mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (an electric Teyana Taylor) years prior, Lockjaw suspects Willa might be his biological daughter. This presents a problem for Lockjaw, whose parentage of a mixed race daughter might interfere with his admission to the Christmas Adventurers, a group of white supremacists who seem to basically run the United States. "One Battle After Another" is funny, triumphant, and necessary — and speaking of triumphant, it's already picking up major awards.

I bring up the "major awards" aspect here for a very precise reason — "One Battle After Another" won the award for best motion picture in the comedy or drama category at the Golden Globes in early 2026. (We can sit here all day and quibble about the fact that "One Battle After Another" is funny but probably not a classic "comedy" and certainly could never be classified as a musical, but the Globes are weird, and if you're an awards-season follower like I am, you know that already.) 

When the cast and creative team behind "One Battle After Another" took the stage at the Beverly Hilton ballroom to accept one of the night's biggest awards, producer Sarah Murphy spoke after Paul Thomas Anderson and paid homage to Adam Somner during her brief remarks (via Entertainment Weekly). "I want to agree with Paul that this has been one of the most incredible filmmaking experiences, once in a lifetime, due largely in part to the person that we share this award with, the late Adam Somner, who we miss every day," she said.

At this point — just before the Oscar nominations come out, where "One Battle After Another" is guaranteed a nod for best picture — it definitely feels like Anderson, Murphy, and their colleagues might get the chance to honor Somner's legacy for a second time at the 98th Academy Awards (which are set to take place on March 15). Losing a talented producer and assistant director like Somner was devastating for those who loved and worked with him, but he'll live on through his work ... and he might just win a posthumous Oscar.