July 4, 2025

INSIDE F1: THE MOVIE — How Brad Pitt hit 180mph (with Lewis Hamilton’s help).

What if you made Top Gun, but with cars? And if Tom Cruise isn’t available, what if you cast Brad Pitt?

The idea was simple, as the most successful in Hollywood often are. It started with the fact that Top Gun: Maverick had made $1.493 billion in 2022, thrilling a worldwide audience who had been stuck at home for two pandemic-heavy years. The movie was produced by the industry heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Beverly Hills Cop) and directed by Joseph Kosinski: together the two men had the sort of brainwave that could go on to make a further billion.

The result? F1: The Movie is a racing movie that aims to bring the live thrills of Formula 1 and the behind-the-helmet personal dramas of the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive to the big screen (and later the small). Taking place over several key races, it’s the first movie that effectively captures the details and daring of F1.

Funded by Warner Bros and Apple, a studio and a streamer, it has had full co-operation from the official Formula 1 body (Lewis Hamilton is a producer) with a video game and soundtrack tie-in to boot. This is the modern way to make an enormous budget film — proving that the movies did not die, they just needed to collaborate more.

“I’ve been doing this for over 50 years and the same thing has been echoed again and again — that the cinema business is done,” Bruckheimer, 81, says. “There was VHS, DVDs, multiple-channel TV, but we’re still doing it.” He smiles. “You have a kitchen, right?” I do. “But you also go to restaurants?” Guilty. “Why? Because the food is good and you want a change. So all we need is to make films people want to leave their home for. That’s our job. And if we fail then, yes, we have a problem.”

The titan behind behemoths from Top Gun to Armageddon and Con Air, Bruckheimer has made glossy action films that have changed Hollywood, for better or worse — ushering in today’s multiplex era. Yes, he has had his flops, but there is a reason he is still making films in his eighties. First, he lives and breathes them. Second, he is very good at making money.

It’s a great popcorn flick (I watched it this afternoon in a nearly-packed theater) that assumes that the audience knows nothing about Formula One rules, produced a man who has (pardon the pun) the formula for making crowd-pleasing summer hits:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll