"There Will Be Blood" (2007) follows Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oil tycoon in early-1900s California, as he builds an oil empire through ruthless ambition and destroys nearly every relationship around him in the process. The film ends with Plainview, now wealthy and isolated, murdering preacher Eli Sunday in the bowling alley of his mansion, closing with the line "I'm finished." Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and loosely based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!", the film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Plainview and Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, the two men whose rivalry drives the story. It won Day-Lewis the Academy Award for Best Actor and is widely regarded as one of the defining American films of its decade.
Table of Contents
- What Happens in the Beginning
- How the Oil Business and Family Drama Unfold
- Why Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview Clash
- What Happens at the Ending and What It Means
- What the Title and Key Symbols Represent
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Happens in the Beginning
The film opens in 1898 with Daniel Plainview working alone as a silver prospector in New Mexico. After a fall injures his leg, he crawls to file his claim, establishing early that his will to succeed outweighs his physical pain or need for help from others. He soon shifts into oil drilling, and when a worker dies in an accident at one of his sites, Plainview adopts the man's infant son, H.W., raising him as his own. By 1911, Plainview has built a small but functioning oil business, presenting himself to townspeople as a "family man" with H.W. at his side to win over skeptical landowners.
A tip from a young man named Paul Sunday leads him to the Sunday family's land near Little Boston, California, where he discovers oil seeping from the ground. He negotiates to buy the property, masking his true intentions by claiming he only wants it for quail hunting. Paul's twin brother, Eli Sunday, is a self-styled preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation. Eli immediately senses Plainview's wealth and tries to extract money from him, first by asking for $10,000 for the church and later by insisting on blessing the new well himself. Plainview deliberately excludes Eli from the blessing ceremony, instead letting H.W. do it, establishing the personal grudge that runs through the rest of the film.
How the Oil Business and Family Drama Unfold
The central conflict is the power struggle between Plainview's secular greed and Eli's religious authority, both men using manipulation to control the town of Little Boston. Plainview expands his operation rapidly, buying out surrounding land and building a pipeline to the coast so he can bypass the railroad monopoly and ship oil independently, a plan that requires crossing a rival landowner's property. A pivotal accident occurs when a gas blowout at one of the wells causes an explosion that destroys a derrick and leaves H.W. permanently deaf. Plainview is more concerned in the moment with the fire threatening his oil than with his son's injury, a moment that foreshadows how he will treat H.W.
once the boy's usefulness as a prop declines. He later sends H.W. away to a school for the deaf, a separation that deepens the emotional distance between them. A man named Henry arrives claiming to be Plainview's half-brother. Plainview, starved for genuine companionship, takes him in and confides in him more openly than he does with anyone else, admitting he dislikes most people and wants to make enough money to get away from them. When Plainview later discovers Henry is an impostor with no real connection to his family, he shoots him and buries him, revealing how quickly his trust curdles into violence once betrayed.
Why Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview Clash
Eli and Plainview represent two competing systems for extracting power from the same desperate community: religion and industry. Eli uses faith healing and public spectacle, including a scene where he violently "casts out" his own father's rheumatism in front of the congregation, to build influence over Little Boston's residents. Plainview uses contracts, money, and the promise of jobs to achieve the same control. Their rivalry escalates when Plainview needs to buy the land of a holdout named William Bandy to complete his pipeline route.
Bandy, a devout member of Eli's church, demands that Plainview be baptized in Eli's church as a condition of the sale. Plainview reluctantly agrees, and Eli uses the baptism ceremony to publicly humiliate him, forcing him to confess that he abandoned his son, in front of the whole congregation. Later, Plainview retaliates during a drunken confrontation after H.W.'s workplace injury and absence weigh on him. He physically assaults Eli, pushing his face into the mud and continuing to taunt him even as Eli begs him to stop, foreshadowing the violence of their final confrontation years later. This sequence establishes that Plainview's hatred for Eli is personal, not merely financial.
What Happens at the Ending and What It Means
The final act jumps forward to 1927. Plainview, now enormously wealthy, lives alone in a mansion, drinking heavily and estranged from almost everyone, including H.W., who is now an adult and wants to start his own independent oil business with his fiancée. Plainview reveals in this scene that H.W. was never his biological son, telling him coldly that he was "a bastard from a basket" taken in only to appear trustworthy to business partners. He disowns H.W., severing the one relationship that had anchored him to another human being.
Eli, now struggling financially after his church's influence has faded, visits Plainview to propose a new oil deal on land he still controls. Plainview agrees to hear him out, but first forces Eli to admit, matching the earlier baptism humiliation, that he is a "false prophet" and that "God is a superstition." Once Eli has degraded himself for the money, Plainview tells him the oil beneath that land has already been drained through a connected well he calls his "milkshake," using the line "I drink your milkshake" to explain that he has already taken everything Eli thought he still owned. Enraged, Eli attacks Plainview, and Plainview beats him to death with a bowling pin in the private bowling alley of his mansion. When his butler arrives, Plainview says simply, "I'm finished," ending the film. The ending shows Plainview's total triumph over his rival and his total ruin as a human being happening in the same moment: he has won every material contest in his life, but the final shot leaves him completely alone, having destroyed his son's trust, his only confidant, and his last remaining enemy, with nothing left to build or defeat.
What the Title and Key Symbols Represent
The title "There Will Be Blood" signals the cost of Plainview's ambition from the start, referencing both the literal violence in the film, including Henry's murder and Eli's death, and the broader toll oil extraction takes on the people and land around it. The phrase itself does not appear as dialogue in the film; it functions as a warning about where unchecked greed leads.
The "milkshake" metaphor in the final scene has become the film's most quoted line because it compresses the entire story into one image: Plainview doesn't just outcompete Eli, he physically drains the resource beneath Eli's feet without Eli ever knowing, the same way he drained H.W.'s childhood and Henry's trust for his own purposes. Oil itself works as the film's central symbol of a resource that enriches whoever controls it while poisoning or displacing everyone who lives near it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is "There Will Be Blood" based on a true story?
No. It is loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!", with Paul Thomas Anderson writing an largely original screenplay inspired by the book's early chapters.
Why does Plainview kill Eli at the end?
Plainview kills Eli after forcing him to renounce his faith for money and then revealing he has already drained the oil beneath Eli's land, a final humiliation that triggers Eli's attack and Plainview's violent response.
Was H.W. really Daniel Plainview's son?
No. H.W. was the orphaned infant son of a worker who died in a drilling accident; Plainview adopted him to appear trustworthy to landowners, a fact he admits to H.W. directly near the end of the film.