There Will Be Blood is a film about a man who mistakes appetite for identity. Daniel Plainview does not want wealth to enjoy it. He wants it to win, to outlast everyone, to be the last one standing in a landscape he has personally stripped bare. Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! into something stranger and more primal: a two-and-a-half-hour character study of naked American will, set against the turn-of-the-century oil rush in Southern California. What fans chase is that combination of grand historical scope, ferocious performance, and the creeping sense that ambition is its own kind of madness. The works below share that DNA.
Essential There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's own filmography, and the Sinclair source
The Lone Operator: Films About Obsession and Power
Films where one man's relentless will reshapes everything around him
The American Myth Unraveled: Series and Drama
Long-form TV that dissects ambition, capitalism, and the cost of empire
The Source Material and Its Kin: Books
Novels that dig into resource extraction, American greed, and the men who built fortunes on other people's land
Power, Corruption, and Consequence: Games
Games where resource control, moral decay, and the hunger for dominance drive the story
Deadwood Did the Same Thing First on Television
David Milch's Deadwood arrives at the same thesis as There Will Be Blood: civilization is not built on ideals but on the ruthless negotiation between competing appetites. Al Swearengen is Daniel Plainview with a saloon. Both men are brilliant, brutal, and constitutionally incapable of being satisfied. The show ran three seasons and a finale film, and every scene operates at the same pitch of barely contained violence and Shakespearean monologue that Anderson put on the big screen.
Jonny Greenwood Invented a New Sound for American Dread
The score for There Will Be Blood is built from Greenwood's own string compositions alongside recordings by Arvo Part and Johannes Brahms. The effect is abrasive, dissonant, and viscerally unsettling: oil as geological violence rendered in sound. Greenwood went on to score every subsequent PTA film, each time finding a different way to make music feel dangerous. His work here, and on The Master, is some of the most distinctive film scoring of the century so far.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Is the Interactive Equivalent
Rockstar's 2018 game is not a fun romp through the West. It is a slow, deliberate meditation on a world ending and the men who cannot leave it behind. Arthur Morgan shares Daniel Plainview's isolation and the same quality of watching himself from a distance as he does things he cannot undo. The game's attention to detail, its pace, and its willingness to let silence and landscape carry meaning all feel closer to Paul Thomas Anderson than to any other filmmaker.
Upton Sinclair's Oil! Is a Different and Equally Essential Book
Anderson's film takes the first third of Sinclair's 1927 novel and then leaves it behind entirely to become something else. The novel keeps going: it follows the son, Bunny, through labor politics, socialism, and the long aftermath of the boom. Reading it after seeing the film is a disorienting pleasure because you keep expecting Plainview to reappear, and he mostly does not. Both works reward patience and reward each other.
A Century of American Extraction Stories
- 1927Upton Sinclair publishes Oil!, the novel that will eventually become the film Oil
- 1941Citizen Kane establishes the template for the rise-and-ruin American tycoon story Citizen Kane
- 1974Chinatown sets the definitive noir about water rights, land, and Southern California corruption Chinatown
- 2004Deadwood begins its three-season run on HBO Deadwood
- 2007There Will Be Blood premieres, winning two Academy Awards including Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis There Will Be Blood
- 2012The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson reunites with Day-Lewis's spirit in a portrait of a different kind of American hunger The Master
- 2018Red Dead Redemption 2 applies the slow, morally serious Western to the open-world game Red Dead Redemption 2
- 2018Disco Elysium proves video games can do political and psychological interiority at literary depth Disco Elysium
More ambition, oil, and American myth
For Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson
Explore the For Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson guide →I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood (2007)