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Well, my fellow film nerds, looks like we’ll have to wait nearly a year and a half to watch Leonardo DiCaprio’s Humboldt County adventures on the big screen.

Warner Bros. has announced a release date for the latest project from master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “Punch Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood”), and it’s NOT SOON ENOUGH, if you ask me: Aug. 8, 2025.

What will we do in the meantime? Keep collecting information tidbits that emerge from the hive mind of cyberspace, I suppose.  Below are some such tidbits, divided into two categories: “probably reliable” and “unconfirmed rumors.”

PROBABLY RELIABLE:

• This will be the most expensive and most commercial movie of Anderson’s career thus far. With a reported budget of around $100 million, the project (still known only under the working title of “BC Project”) will be an “event film” summer blockbuster, with a dedicated release in IMAX theaters, of which Humboldt County has zero, unfortunately. The nearest ones are in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
• The multi-star cast includes DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Alana Haim, Wood Harris and newcomer Chase Infiniti.
• Anderson is writing, directing and producing the film, his 10th feature. 
• In addition to the confirmed Humboldt County locations (Cutten, outside Eureka High, Trinidad, Arcata), the production went on to film scenes in Sacramento County. A minor controversy flared up when a homeless encampment in Cesar Chavez Park was cleared to make way for filming. Other locations include Ronald Reagan’s former mansion in East Sacramento and the Fab 40s neighborhood, where a simulated explosion was shot. Anderson has said that other shooting locations will include Texas and Mexico.

UNCONFIRMED RUMORS:

• The plot. We still don’t know what this thing is about. While many signs point to it being an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” other signs (including the contemporary setting) point elsewhere. The latest rumor, reported by movie gossip site World of Reel, is that Anderson is very loosely adapting “Vineland” while updating the book’s Reagan-era plot to set the events “in an alternate reality America” where hippies do battle with Trump/MAGA types, possibly even including batshit Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Anderson previously adapted Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice.”
• Sean Penn’s character is rumored to be the head of a white supremacist group who’s out to eliminate an interracial child he had with Regina Hall’s character. In this rumor, DiCaprio plays the child’s adoptive father.
• The budget could be as high as $175 million — this according to World of Reel.

Anyone else have any tasty rumors? Let us know. Just 497 days left to speculate.

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