Daniel Plainview's IQ — what the methodology actually says.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is early-20th-century oil prospector whose intelligence is rendered almost entirely as predatory pattern-recognition — the rare film that treats capitalist intelligence as cognitive material worth the camera's full attention. The character's intellectual signature in the show is predatory commercial intelligence, the social-engineering version of strategic thinking, intelligence as an instrument of acquisition rather than understanding.

This is the part of the question "what is Daniel Plainview's IQ" that the search engine flattens. The real question — the one viewers are circling — is whether the show treats his mind seriously. That's the question TVI can actually answer.

There Will Be Blood scores 172/200 (Masterclass tier) because Paul Thomas Anderson treats Plainview's intelligence with the kind of patient, granular attention the medium reserves for its most serious work. The film's first 15 silent minutes are themselves a structural argument about how this kind of intelligence operates — by acquisition, by observation, by a refusal to speak unless speech is the most efficient instrument available. The rubric rewards that structural seriousness.

For the full score breakdown — Cognitive Stimulation, Educational Value, Craft & Quality, and the rationale — see There Will Be Blood on TV Intelligentsia. Or read what an IQ Score is and how it's calculated.