‘F1″: A Race To Nowhere?

F1, a movie starring Brad Pitt, supported by Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon, will soon be opening in a theater near you (June 27). Directed (and co-written) by Joseph Kosinski, whose most recent release is Top Gun: Maverick, F1 has a reported budget of some $300 million.

This undoubtedly goes to explain why the list of production companies involved is longer than the Mulsanne Straight, including Apple Original Films (deep pockets until the tariffs really kick in), Jerry Bruckheimer Films (a producer of the aforementioned Top Gun: Maverick) and Dawn Apollo Films.

While you may not be familiar with the last-named, know that Lewis Hamilton established it. “Who?,” you might wonder. The seven-time Formula One champion.

Which means that F1, the movie, at the very least, has considerable street cred. (Hamilton is tied for the all-time most F1 championships.)

But not to put too fine a point on this: Why do they keep making films motor sports?

The box office is mediocre.

And even actual televised races have underwhelming audience sizes.

The most recent racing-oriented movie is Gran Turismo, released in August 2023. It is the story of a young man who actually benefitted from excessive video game playing: he won a spot in the Nissan GT Academy—established by the car maker along with Sony PlayStation and Polyphony Digital, a video game developer—for playing Gran Turismo. His game-playing skills put him behind the wheel of a real race car.

This teen-defies-the-odds-and-drives-cool-cars-really-fast film took in a little over $44 million at the box office.

Another film released in 2023, Ferrari, while more of a biography of Enzo than a racing movie, has a horrific crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia as one of its key elements. Directed by Michael Mann and starring Adam Driver, the film crashed at the domestic box office, earning some $18.5 million.

What you can a solid success in the genre, however, was 2019’s Ford v Ferrari, directed by James Mangold and starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale. It brought in approximately $118 million at the US box office.

Odds are, the Ford Motor Company had more than a little something to do with getting people in theater seats. (Spoiler alert: Henry Ford II beats Enzo Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans.)

While those three movies are about high-level sports car racing, Rush, released in 2013, is about Formula One. The movie, directed by Ron Howard, is based on the real rivalry between British playboy James Hunt, played by Chris Hemsworth with Thor-style locks, and Niki Lauda, a highly technical Austrian driver, who experienced a terrible crash at the German Grand Prix, such that actor Daniel Bruhl spends a good part of the movie with a massively scarred face.

Rush received critical acclaimed. But had middling box office: $27 million.

To find a racing-themed movie that did really well at the box office you have to go back to 1990, the NASCAR-themed Days of Thunder, starring a 27-year-old Tom Cruise and ingenue Nicole Kidman (who married months after meeting on the set). It grossed some $157 million.

In terms of small-screen numbers, the viewers of racing events—NASCAR, IndyCar or Formula One—are rounding errors of the number of viewers of an NFL game.Formula One racing is in some ways like professional soccer: there are massive numbers of fans in Europe (and elsewhere), but not so many in the U.S. To be sure, more Americans are watching F1 races, something attributable to Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which is now in its seventh season. But the viewership of F1 races in the U.S. are about on par with the numbers scored by National Hockey League games.

Back to the movie.

All of the dramatic elements are there. Man against man. Man against man in vehicles that can lead to death in a blink of an eye. Man trying to redeem his past. There are so many organic elements to racing—most all of them visual and kinetic—it is surprising there aren’t movies on that subject coming out every week. But there aren’t for the simple fact that as exciting as a small minority find motor sports to be, it just isn’t that interesting, and it doesn’t matter who is behind the wheel. (Sorry, Brad.)

People do find vehicle-centric movies entertaining—think only of the never-ending Fast & Furious franchise—but motor sports simply have little traction.