F1 was included in my June Release Radar on Instagram (@ithinkiveseenthis_film_before for those who don’t follow!) meaning I had my eye on it for this month. I think my blurb there summed up my feelings pretty well. To quote myself, I said, “Honestly, I don’t care about F1. The sport or the movie. But it has been reported that this is one of the most expensive films ever made (with a budget of over $300 million) so I’m just super interested to see how it will do both critically and at the box office.” I actually wasn’t even sure I was going to see it. But good reviews and word of mouth convinced me. To see it in IMAX even (everyone be proud of me for being so brave). For the millionth time, I couldn’t miss out on the cultural conversation. And I made the right decision. The movie (and IMAX experience) was both worth it and a conversation. Leaving the theater, everyone was talking about what they had just seen. One guy said, “I didn’t look at my phone once!” A glowing review in this day and age. A girl recapped it as simply, “Explosions. Sports. Romance.” Like, yeah, pretty much. It has it all in the way a summer blockbuster should. And, industry-wise, it’s been dubbed “Apple’s first box office hit”. How did F1 become the film to do it?

F1 or Formula One is “the highest class of worldwide racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars.” A Formula One season consists of a series of races, known as Grands Prix, which take place in multiple countries on circuits or closed roads. The sport has been around since the 1940s, but it hit peak cultural relevance after 2019 when Netflix released a reality TV series called Drive to Survive. Not only did the show hit right around the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when everyone was searching for anything to pass the time, but it also gave an inside look at a world that was largely unfamiliar, particularly for American audiences as F1 is a predominantly European sport. Viewers were exposed to the highly competitive and dramatic realm of F1 along with a cast of characters from drivers to teams, all in pursuit of success and glory defined by tenths of a second. And a sports story, like any other, ripe for a romanticized film version.

The people to take the sport to the big screen is the team behind the 2022 hit Top Gun: Maverick: director Joseph Kosinski, screenwriter Ehren Kruger, and cinematographer Claudio Miranda. Maverick is not technically a sports movie, but the fighter jets can be stand-ins for players and teams in a typical sports movie arc. And they make just as much noise and fast moves as a racecar. The similarities don’t end there. In F1, Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes. He was once a rising Formula One star but his career was ended by a near-fatal crash. Now, 30 years later, the film finds him freelancing in whatever races he can find. Mostly for the fun of it. And some money to help pay off gambling debts. He’s tracked down by his old friend and former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who is now the owner of the APXGP (pronounced “apex GP”) Formula One team. Ruben’s team is doing so badly it’s lost $350 million and, if they don’t win at least one race, the board will fire him and dissolve the team. He wants Sonny to join him and be the second driver to his rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Sonny reluctantly agrees. He wants his chance at being the best despite the fact that he still has nightmares about his crash (documentary footage of a real crash (Martin Donnelly during the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix) is used here) and isn’t good at being a team player. Well, neither is his new teammate. Sonny and the hotshot British rookie Joshua vacillate between rivals, partners, and mentor/mentee in a battle of the old ways vs. the new over the course of the racing season. Sonny also meets the team’s principal Kaspar (Kim Bodnia), board member Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), and technical director Kate McKenna, the first woman to hold this title in the F1 world (Kerry Condon, incredible accent). The story reminded me a lot of Top Gun: Maverick. Sonny literally is a maverick. He breaks the rules and does everything his own way. He’s not in it for the money or the glory. He’s in it for the love of the sport. He might be older than everyone else, but he’s the best for a reason. It’s a cliche but classical story. An old underdog making his comeback. The movie was predictable in its shape, but not in every detail. 

Brad Pitt is charming as always, playing Sonny as a cocky, swaggering cowboy. But in the more serious scenes, the more emotional moments, you can feel him phoning it in. He even said in an interview that he was, “more interested in the racing than the acting scenes at times”. That’s fairly obvious. Does the movie need him to do more? To be more? Not necessarily. But you do want to feel like a veteran like Brad Pitt is giving it his all. In one scene, we find Sonny in a Vegas casino. Seeing Brad Pitt in this setting immediately reminded me of my favorite version of him: Ocean’s Eleven. He hasn’t lost his charm, but he doesn’t bring the same spark, the same twinkle in his eye to F1. I’d never seen Damson Idris in anything before but I think that worked towards his character, a newcomer trying to make a name for himself. He fit the part of a young, flashy guy attracted to the fame and fortune. I loved his accent but not as much as Kerry Condon’s. She was incredible in The Banshees of Inisherin and, while this role doesn’t even begin to compare to that, she’s great here too. Javier Bardem has been an injection of fun to all of his recent projects, namely Dune: Part Two and F1. He’s not a main character, but he leaves a lasting impression. Also Joshua Pearce’s mom is the therapist from Ted Lasso (Sarah Niles)! It was bothering me the whole time where I knew her from. This is a completely different look for her.

Since I never watched Drive to Survive, I knew absolutely nothing about the sport of F1 going in. The movie explains what it can, but doesn’t slow down to make sure you’re following. I didn’t really understand most of the rules and regulations and procedures and strategy, but it mostly didn’t matter in terms of the emotional arc of the film. But the strategy, to me, was one of the most interesting parts of the movie. I would never have known how important it is in the sport. It never occurred to me that there would be any more to it than “drive fast”. I also learned that, in F1, sometimes your biggest rival is your teammate, a fact of the sport that defines the movie. Everyone is racing the same track, but your teammate is the only other person with the exact same setup as you in terms of car, technology, team, pit crew, etc. making them the only actual one-to-one comparison you have. With all those factors being the same, the only variable is the driver. Whoever wins must actually be better.

Watching F1 is an intense experience in the most fun way. The IMAX viewing in particular is fully immersive. During the racing scenes you actually feel like you are in the car and on the track with the combination of camera angles and sound. Some of these moments are pure rock and roll. The on-screen crowd is going wild and the soundtrack feels like a party between the needle drops and music by Hans Zimmer, who’s doing his own version of the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for Challengers. It’s all an adrenaline high to match the adrenaline junkies who participate in this sport. It makes the quieter moments all the more impactful. I felt legitimately anxious during some of the races like I was watching a real live sporting event. What was going to happen? Who was going to win? The final race gave me actual chills. 

The film creates such a visceral feeling putting viewers in direct proximity to the real thing. I started to wonder how they did it. But then I remembered the movie is from the director of Top Gun: Maverick. The same guy who put the audience in the actual cockpit to experience the speed and force of an FA-18 plane and invented new camera technology to do so. So, yeah, it makes sense that Joseph Kosinski would find a way to make F1 feel the same way. Physics and science and technology are all extremely important in the real sport of F1. Any little thing you can do to shave tenths of seconds off your driving time. The same care went into crafting this film. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda collaborated with Sony to create a new piece of camera technology to attach to the cars that was extremely small and lightweight because every added pound and adjustment would affect the aerodynamics. The filmmaking team also worked with Apple (the company behind the movie) to use the iPhone camera sensor, chip, and iOS software to build a camera that was similar in size to the real onboard cameras inside the cars. Formula One then actually let the filmmakers put the new Apple camera inside some of the real race cars (not just the fictional APX cars) during the races they filmed. That’s a huge part of what makes the film so real. It almost is. The movie uses very few special effects, opting for practical work whenever possible. It’s an experiment in how close to the edge of reality they could take the film to capture the energy that makes the sport of F1 so exhilarating. 

The film doesn’t only recreate the physical feeling of F1, it brings much of the real world inside it as well. The movie was made in concert with thel Formula One league and was produced by Lewis Hamilton, one of the most well-known and decorated F1 drivers. One article broke this down for non-racing fans as “the equivalent of LeBron James producing a basketball movie featuring actual NBA players and teams”. Re-recording mixer on the film, Juan Peralta, explained, “Formula 1 has been so tied up in rights, so there’s never been a movie made about it.” Until now. The film’s creative team just had to convince the racing league that they were trying to realistically capture the speed and behind-the-scenes work of Formula One and the league agreed to a collaboration to create a film they believed would promote the sport. Apple’s partnership with Formula One gave the filmmaking team, and audiences alike, unprecedented access. They were able to film during some of the biggest races, traveling from city to city, building their garage, and getting ready for the race alongside the real racing teams. Nine real races are featured in the movie with some memorable moments included that fans might recognize. Brad Pitt and Damson Idris also did a lot of driving in real F1 race cars as the team filmed for 18 months. A liaison who oversaw and led the integration of the film and the sport only had one rule for the production: it could never interfere with the integrity of the races. This meant the F1 team needed to take advantage of every short pause in the action and be prepared to quickly do a shot in one take. 

With so many real racers mentioned by name, and a few of them even featured in brief cameos (Verstappen, Leclerc, Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, and more. This meant nothing to me but there were people who cheered in the theater when they saw their faces on screen.), I wondered how they would feel about their placements in the film’s fictional races. Would their egos be hurt by an off-the-podium finish in a fabricated story? But Kosinski promised the drivers that the film would use the real races’ leaderboards (for the most part). This was helped by the fact that the fictional APX team is an underdog at the bottom of the standings, so it didn’t affect too much. The commentators who narrate the races do a lot of expositional work in the film to explain technicalities of the sport to the general audience and also keep us aware of where we are in the race and the story. Real-life F1 Sky Sports announcers Martin Brundle and David Croft stepped in for the job. They would watch the cuts of the races and ad lib their commentary. Real F1 races are also shot at a high frame rate with fast shutter speed. This goes for many sports to avoid motion blur (something that is twice as important for Formula One to keep all the sponsors’ logos visible). However, this image clarity doesn’t look particularly cinematic, so Joseph Kosinski got the organization to change their shutter angle so he could use actual race footage in the film. F1 as it exists would not have been possible without the partnership between Apple and Formula One.

Something that stood out for me in the film is the amount of money involved in F1. Between the technology of the cars, prize money for the races, and sponsorships across all of it, billions of dollars are circulated through the sport. Teams often pay half a million dollars just to be able to compete in the races. That’s insane. To be profitable, or even just break even, they need to make money back, usually through sponsors, both for the team and individual drivers. This is a point of contention between Joshua and Sonny. Sonny doesn’t care about his image or the money. But Joshua is just starting out in his career. He’ll put on a show and smile for the cameras to maintain his relevance and keep and establish brand deals for himself. As for the team sponsors, the film presented an interesting opportunity for brand involvement. Brands are such an integral part of the sport that it was only too easy to create product placement opportunities. Forbes published a really fascinating article detailing how brands like Mercedes, IWC, Expensify (which I had never even heard of before) and more paid millions of dollars to sponsor the fictional Formula 1 team in the film. I recommend reading the full thing but I just want to highlight some key points here. In the real world of F1, getting your company’s logo on the front wing of an actual race car costs at least $5 million per year while title sponsorships (a brand name integrated into the team’s official name like Oracle Red Bull Racing or Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team) range from $30 million at the low end to $100 million per year for the most popular teams. For their money, companies get television exposure and prestige by association. An expert told Forbes that many brands will pay tens of millions of dollars to be involved in Formula 1 despite most fans having absolutely no idea what the company is or does (like me with Expensify). “What those people are really paying for is to be in the paddock and have access to other big companies they want to work with,” he says. “If you can do 20 multimillion-dollar deals because you’re sitting next to the CEO or whoever you need to speak to, that more than justifies the spend.” Movie product placement is handled differently. It is traditionally sold by seconds of “clear and identifiable exposure” on-screen and its value depends on the amount of logos, verbal mentions, or usages in those seconds. This can cost a brand anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million. Since corporate branding is already such a large part of the culture of the sport, showing cars and driver apparel covered in logos only adds to F1’s authenticity instead of being obvious and annoying product placement like we get in other films (I’m looking at you Audis in the MCU). Brad Pitt was paid an estimated $30 million to star in the film but, in turn, became a “human billboard” with a very famous face. Throughout the movie, he’s often wearing apparel covered in more than a dozen logos for brands, including Mercedes, IWC, Geico, EA Sports and Expensify. 

Cross-promotional deals and product tie-ins have been customary parts of a theatrical campaign for many years, but only recently have they begun to see mainstream recognition for movies like Barbie and Wicked whose promotional runs have felt widespread and all-consuming. F1 participated on this end as well. Watch brand IWC Schaffhausen, which also worked with Top Gun: Maverick, released a trio of new watches (including one that’s $27,900), Tommy Hilfiger put out an entire line of streetwear (including a $490 satin varsity jacket), and Mercedes is selling a limited-edition car (which has a traditional base price of $191,550), each with the APXGP branding. Even KFC, a brand with no ties to the movie, ran commercials showing the APXGP car making a pit stop at its drive-thru window. Expensify already began to see profit before the movie had been released. The company-branded APXGP car made appearances in music videos for Ed Sheeran, Tate McRae, Don Toliver and Doja Cat (all for songs that are part of the official movie soundtrack) and the car is playable in the EA Sports F1 video game. At this year’s Met Gala, Damson Idris arrived in the Expensify-branded car and wore the Expensify-branded fire suit on the red carpet. The company saw a 400% increase in website traffic and product sign-ups that night. The only restriction on sponsorships for the film were any brands that competed with core Formula 1 partners or brands that were competitive to Apple. It all comes full circle when you realize that a movie that puts branding and products at the forefront was made by a company better known for selling iPhones than for making films.

Early in the film, Tobias Menzies’ board member character tells Sonny, “I don’t know a huge amount about [F1], so yeah, I’ve been binge watching Drive to Survive, trying to work out what’s going on.” I appreciated the knowingness of this line as a wink to the American public who learned everything they know from the show. But unlike him, I did not watch Drive to Survive as my homework. Instead, F1 was my crash course (yes, pun intended). I think that might have added to my enjoyment of the film, getting such a close look at an entire world I knew nothing about. What can I say? I’m a huge nerd. I love to learn new things. It made my head spin with questions about the physics and technology and money and physical training. How do you get into doing this? Or even realize you’re good at it? So many new rabbit holes to dive down. I don’t think I’m now going to get into F1 as a sport, but it just shows how captivating the film was to get me invested in this world. The movie is fast, it’s sleek, there’s tension and drama but never gets too heavy. And it’s a full sensory experience like few other films. A technical achievement, a tried-and-true story, an astounding atmosphere, a conversation starter on many levels, “Explosions. Sports. Romance.”, the full summer blockbuster package. No wonder Apple is already thinking about a sequel. F1 fires on (almost) all cylinders (you guys are lucky I saved all my puns for the end). I would definitely recommend checking it out, in theaters, and even better, in IMAX, if you can!

2025 Count: 45 movies, 33 seasons of television, 3 specials