By Wild Oscar / Escondido Grapevine / January 12, 2026
“One Battle After Another,” the new Warner Bros. picture written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opened recently— and it doesn’t merely visit San Diego. It moves in, rearranges the furniture, and leaves its footprints all over the place.
Last year the production spent roughly six weeks roaming the region with cameras and cables, collecting scenery the way tourists collect fridge magnets. Border areas. Otay Mesa. Borrego Springs. Downtown. If you squint during the trailers, you can practically hear the local traffic reports.
“Definitely when you see this on the big screen, you’re going to see a lot of San Diego in it,” said Guy Langman, the city’s film program manager, sounding like a man who’s already spotted familiar palm trees in the rushes.
The county, never one to waste a good ledger entry, says the shoot pumped nearly $7 million into the local economy—hotels, catering, wages for extras and crew, and assorted cinematic odds and ends that don’t usually show up on a tourist brochure.
The filmmakers, meanwhile, were not motivated solely by sunshine and civic pride. California’s tax credits played their part. Once a production wanders beyond the traditional 30-mile Los Angeles orbit, it qualifies for an extra five to ten percent back from the state. San Diego’s varied landscapes and ready-made infrastructure did the rest. Desert by breakfast, border by lunch, city lights by dinner. Try that in Burbank.
These days the city and county operate less like distant landlords and more like a concierge desk with walkie-talkies. Permits, logistics, coordination—handled. At one point, even Border Patrol and the CHP were looped in for a large Otay Mesa set piece, a reminder that making movies is largely about politely asking a lot of people for temporary permission.
San Diego has flirted with Hollywood before. Bits of Top Gun, Jurassic Park, and Anchorman were all shot here. But insiders say the scale of this production is something the region hasn’t seen in quite a while—and possibly a signal flare for what could come next.
For local film workers, that matters. Big shoots mean real jobs at home, not one-way U-Haul trips to Los Angeles or New York. The possibility, however faint, that a career can be built without changing ZIP codes.
More San Diego-shot projects are already queued up. Langman notes that Apple TV’s Way of the Warrior Kid, filmed around Mission Bay, could arrive before year’s end—another glossy postcard sent out under a streaming logo.
University of San Diego communication professor Eric Pierson sees something larger at stake: momentum. Movies that visibly look like San Diego encourage more productions to ask the same question—why not here?
But Pierson also points to the elephant that wandered out of the room in 2013: the city’s Film Commission. Dismantled during budget trimming, it has yet to be replaced with anything of equal heft. For a city that sells sunshine by the square mile, the absence strikes him as self-sabotage.
“A city this beautiful, with this much to offer, without a working film commission?” he said. “That shouldn’t be happening.”
Jodi Cilley, founder and president of Film Consortium San Diego, agrees—and adds the obvious closer. Few places can double as mountains, beaches, urban streets, farmland, and the edge of another country without a passport check.
In movie terms, San Diego can play almost any role. The only question is whether Hollywood keeps calling—or whether the line goes back to voicemail.
