There Will Be Blood (2007): Ending Explained

Quick Recap

There Will Be Blood follows Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a ruthless silver miner who discovers oil in California at the turn of the 20th century. After a worker dies in an accident, Daniel adopts the man's orphaned son, H.W., using the boy to present himself as a family man to investors and landowners. In 1911, Daniel is tipped off about oil deposits in Little Boston by Paul Sunday, where he meets Paul's twin brother Eli, a young charismatic preacher who demands $5,000 for his church in exchange for his family's land.

Daniel successfully builds an oil empire, but his relationship with Eli becomes increasingly antagonistic. Eli humiliates Daniel by forcing him to publicly confess his sins and be baptized before the congregation to secure a crucial pipeline easement. Meanwhile, H.W. is deafened in a drilling accident, and Daniel's paranoia grows when a man claiming to be his half-brother Henry appears, only for Daniel to discover he's an impostor and murder him. Daniel eventually sends the now-adult H.W. away when H.W. announces he's starting his own competing oil company in Mexico.

The film then jumps forward to 1927. Daniel lives alone in his massive mansion, a wealthy but isolated alcoholic who has become a complete misanthrope. His relationship with H.W. has deteriorated completely, and he has achieved everything he wanted materially but is spiritually and emotionally bankrupt.

What Happens in the Ending

The final sequence begins when Eli Sunday arrives at Daniel's mansion, now disheveled and desperate, seeking money. The oil boom has ended, and Eli has fallen on hard times while Daniel has thrived. Eli wants Daniel to buy a particular tract of land he claims to control, hoping to broker a deal for money.

Daniel invites Eli to his private bowling alley in the mansion's basement. In a cruelly ironic reversal of their earlier dynamic, Daniel forces Eli to repeat "I am a false prophet, God is a superstition" before he'll discuss business. Eli, desperate and broken, complies and debases himself completely, screaming the blasphemous phrases.

Daniel then reveals his trump card: he's already drained all the oil from that land through slant drilling from an adjacent property he owns. Using the famous "milkshake" metaphor, Daniel explains: "I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!" This means Eli's land is worthless—Daniel has already taken everything valuable from beneath it without Eli's knowledge or consent.

The confrontation escalates violently. Daniel begins physically attacking Eli, chasing him around the bowling alley while ranting about his hatred for him. In a fit of rage, Daniel beats Eli to death with a bowling pin. As Eli's body lies on the floor, Daniel's butler appears at the top of the stairs. Daniel calmly announces, "I'm finished," and the film ends.

The Meaning Behind the Ending

The ending of There Will Be Blood represents the complete moral and spiritual annihilation of both men, though in vastly different ways. Daniel's declaration "I'm finished" operates on multiple levels: he's finished with Eli (having murdered him), finished with his life's work (having extracted all he can from the earth), and finished as a human being (having destroyed every meaningful relationship and moral boundary).

The bowling alley setting is significant—it's a recreational space meant for leisure and community, but Daniel uses it alone in his mansion, emblematic of how his wealth has isolated him from humanity. The murder weapon being a bowling pin rather than something more serious emphasizes the casualness of the violence and how completely Daniel's humanity has eroded. He kills not out of necessity or even hot-blooded passion, but from pure contempt and the opportunity to finally, definitively win their decades-long battle.

The "milkshake" speech is Paul Thomas Anderson's brilliant metaphor for capitalism's rapacious nature. Daniel didn't just compete with others—he literally stole from them, extracting resources from beneath their land without their consent or compensation. This is presented not as a crime but as clever business, perfectly capturing how American capitalism rewards such ruthlessness while dressing it up in the language of entrepreneurial ingenuity.

Eli's complete degradation—forced to deny his faith, then murdered—represents the death of the religious hypocrite, but also suggests that false faith and authentic greed are equally corrosive. Eli used religion as a tool for power and money just as Daniel used family and community. In the end, the more authentically evil man (Daniel) triumphs over the hypocritical one (Eli), but it's a victory that leaves Daniel completely alone and hollowed out.

Character Arcs and Resolution

Daniel Plainview's Trajectory: Daniel's arc is one of pure degeneration. He begins the film as a driven, calculating businessman willing to bend ethics but still maintaining some human connections (particularly with H.W.). By the end, he has achieved total material success and total spiritual failure. His adoption of H.W. was always transactional, but earlier in the film there were hints of genuine affection. By the end, he has severed even that relationship, unable to tolerate H.W.'s independence or success.

His final state—drunk, alone in a mansion, murderous—is the logical endpoint of a life dedicated solely to accumulation and domination. Daniel doesn't learn or grow; he metastasizes. His paranoia, misanthropy, and cruelty, which were always present, have consumed everything else. The man who pulled himself from a mining pit with a broken leg ends up in an underground bowling alley as a broken person, having descended back into the earth metaphorically even as he lives in luxury.

Eli Sunday's Fall: Eli's arc mirrors Daniel's in being about the corruption of power, but while Daniel pursued wealth directly, Eli sought it through spiritual manipulation. His faith healing, church leadership, and religious fervor were always performances designed to extract money and influence from his community. The ending forces him to confess this explicitly.

His desperate return to Daniel after years represents the final bankruptcy of his approach. Where Daniel's ruthlessness was at least honest about itself, Eli's wrapped itself in divine purpose. When the oil boom ends and his congregation's wealth evaporates, he has nothing—no genuine faith, no real community, only the hollow trappings of religion. His death is almost pathetic; he's not even worthy of a dignified murder, just beaten to death like a dog in a bowling alley.

H.W.'s Absence: H.W.'s physical absence from the ending is crucial. He has escaped Daniel's orbit, moved to Mexico, started his own company, gotten married, and built an independent life. In a film about two men destroying themselves through their obsessions, H.W. represents the possibility of breaking the cycle—though notably, he must flee to another country to do so. His deaf-muteness (caused by Daniel's oil operation) symbolizes how he's been damaged by his proximity to Daniel's ambition but has found ways to communicate and thrive despite it.

Alternate Interpretations

The Capitalist Critique Reading: The ending can be viewed as Anderson's ultimate indictment of American capitalism's founding mythology. Daniel represents the "self-made man" taken to its logical extreme—someone who builds an empire through individual drive but whose success requires the destruction of family, community, and morality. His triumph is America's triumph, and his hollowness is America's hollowness. "I'm finished" becomes an epitaph for the entire American project of rapacious individualism.

The Religious Corruption Reading: Some interpret the film as equally condemning of both capitalism (Daniel) and organized religion (Eli). From this perspective, the ending shows that false prophets and authentic tyrants are both parasites on human society. Neither Daniel's honest greed nor Eli's hypocritical faith offers salvation. Their mutual destruction suggests that when material ambition and spiritual charlatanism collide, everyone loses—there are no winners in a race to the bottom.

The Oedipal Reading: Daniel's relationship with H.W. can be read as deeply Oedipal—Daniel as a father who cannot tolerate his son's independence and ultimately symbolically murders him by cutting off their relationship. Eli, in some sense, becomes a substitute target for Daniel's rage at H.W.'s departure. The murder of Eli is displaced patricide/filicide, with Daniel destroying a "son" figure (Eli is young enough to be his son) who he can actually reach, since H.W. has escaped.

The Inevitable Descent: A darker reading suggests that Daniel was always destined to end this way—that his opening climb from the mining pit was only temporary, and his true trajectory was always downward. The mansion's bowling alley is literally underground, suggesting Daniel has returned to the pit he started in, but now it's a pit of his own making, lined with luxury that can't fill the void. "I'm finished" means he's completed his circle, returning to isolation and darkness.

Themes and Symbolism

Oil as Blood: The title's metaphor is literalized throughout, but especially in the ending. Daniel has spent his life extracting literal blood from the earth (oil is called "black gold" or "black blood"), but he's also metaphorically drained everyone around him. The slant drilling that steals Eli's oil is like a vampire's bite—invisible extraction that leaves the victim depleted without their knowledge. By the end, the only blood left to spill is Eli's actual blood on the bowling alley floor.

The Bowling Alley: This recreational space perverted into a murder scene symbolizes how Daniel has corrupted every aspect of normal human life. Bowling is a communal, working-class activity, but Daniel does it alone in a private mansion. The pins he knocks down have become human beings he destroys. The alley's location in the basement/underground connects to the film's recurring imagery of descent—into mines, into oil wells, into moral degradation.

Deafness and Communication: H.W.'s deafness, caused by the derrick explosion, represents the breakdown of communication between father and son, and more broadly, how the pursuit of wealth literally destroys human connection. Daniel's inability or unwillingness to learn sign language shows his rejection of adaptation and empathy. By the ending, Daniel is effectively deaf to all human connection, sealed in his own isolated world.

The Milkshake: This instantly iconic metaphor captures predatory capitalism perfectly—the idea that resources can be extracted from someone else's property legally, through superior technology and positioning, without them even knowing. It's theft made respectable through technical sophistication. Daniel's glee in explaining it to Eli shows how he's internalized exploitation as victory, taking pleasure not just in winning but in the mechanics of how he won.

The Butler's Presence: The butler appearing at the end and Daniel's calm "I'm finished" to him suggests that this violence is almost routine, that murder is just another task to be reported complete to household staff. It's the ultimate banality of evil—Daniel has become so morally inverted that killing a man requires no more emotional energy than finishing a meal.

Final Thoughts

There Will Be Blood offers one of cinema's most devastating character studies, and its ending provides no catharsis, no redemption, no lesson learned. Daniel Plainview doesn't recognize his mistakes or feel remorse. He simply declares himself "finished," as if completing a checklist. This refusal of conventional narrative resolution is precisely what makes the ending so powerful and disturbing.

Paul Thomas Anderson presents us with an American origin story where the protagonist is a monster, and his monstrousness is inseparable from his success. Daniel couldn't have built his empire without his ruthlessness; his personal destruction is not a contradiction of the American Dream but its fulfillment. He gets everything he wanted and becomes a demon in the process.

The genius of the ending lies in its horrible satisfaction. We've watched Daniel and Eli antagonize each other for the entire film. Their final confrontation delivers on that tension spectacularly, with Daniel utterly dominating and destroying Eli. It's dramatically satisfying in the moment—we've been waiting for this showdown. But immediately after, we're left with the emptiness of it all: a broken old man in a bowling alley having beaten another broken man to death, with no one left who cares about either of them.

The film refuses to moralize explicitly but makes its critique devastatingly clear through accumulation of detail. Daniel's journey from the opening scene—a lone man in a pit, determined to climb out—to the closing scene—a lone man in a basement, having climbed as high as possible only to find nothing there—is a perfect circle of emptiness. He has conquered everything and everyone, drained the land, and consumed all competition. And in victory, he is more alone than he was in that first pit, because now he's built walls that can never be torn down.

"I'm finished" resonates because it applies to Daniel in every sense: morally, emotionally, spiritually, and potentially legally (having just committed murder). But it also suggests something final about the American entrepreneurial spirit the film examines—that its endpoint is not prosperity and community but isolation and violence. The blood that was promised in the title has been spilled, but it's unclear if anyone has actually won.