'FI' just won the box office. Meet the man who's cracked the blockbuster code.

Yahoo

2 days ago

He's the man behind your favorite summer blockbusters: Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters and now F1: The Movie. With heart-pounding action, A-list stars and a commitment to realistic spectacle, Joseph Kosinski has quietly become one of Hollywood's most reliable hitmakers.
F1 zoomed into theaters this past weekend with an impressive $55.6 million domestic debut and a $144 million total haul, marking the biggest global opening of leading man Brad Pitt's career and the first commercial win for Apple Films. Kosinski doesn't just create summer blockbusters; he builds worlds at 200 miles per hour, and audiences can't get enough.
But while horsepower is pivotal, the real fuel behind the films is heart, Kosinski revealed in a conversation ahead of his latest film's release.
"I grew up in the '80s and '90s, going to the movies, and I think I'm trying to recreate that big screen experience that I had as a kid," he told Yahoo, praising directors Steven Spielberg and James Cameron.
"Those are the experiences I remember seeing on the big screen," he said. "I approach [blockbusters] from the point of view of: what would I want to see if I went to the movies? Selfishly, what's a world that I want to dive into and live in for a few years? I got to create this incredible scenario where I have a Formula One team for two seasons and travel the world with Brad Pitt as my lead driver."
F1 follows Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a retired driver coaxed back into racing by an old friend and former teammate (Javier Bardem) to help a struggling Formula One team. While driving for the fictional underdog APXGP, Hayes mentors young rising star Joshua Pearce, played by actor Damson Idris.
The film is a blast: the racing scenes are thrilling, the settings are realistic and flashy and the actors' performances are great, with Pitt in the driver's seat, charming as ever. While F1 is action-packed, it feels both massive in scale and personal as you root for the characters. You don't need to know anything about Formula One to get pulled in. Positive word of mouth and good reviews should keep F1 holding strong at the box office over the holiday weekend, much like Kosinski's last two hits.
It's no secret Hollywood loves a franchise, and we love watching them. Top Gun: Maverick was a sequel more than three decades in the making, while Twisters was a reboot. Both had built-in audiences. Those were career highlights for Kosinski, but in a landscape dominated by existing IP, he said it was freeing to develop F1 as an original story.
"It's fun to be able to create a character from scratch, which we're able to do here, for an audience to meet all new people. There's no canon. There's no history we need to stick to. We get to start with a blank sheet of paper and take people on a ride learning about Sonny Hayes, APXGP and the world of Formula One," he said.
Still, building something new from the ground up came with its own set of challenges. It wasn't casting a big name — "Brad said this was a movie that he had been looking for his whole career and was never able to find or put together" — it was convincing Formula One to let them shoot from inside the sport's most guarded spaces.
"Formula One is a very tightly controlled, closed system. To be open to us not only making a film about them, but to make it from inside their organization and shooting at the races ... was a huge ask," he said.
Authenticity is key to Kosinski's formula. In Top Gun: Maverick, U.S. Navy pilots flew the actors on top-of-the-line fighter jets. He needed similar access for F1 in order to get the same level of realism that audiences responded to in Maverick. "We were able to get inside and actually shoot at real races, shoot on the track and make all the people that are in the sport part of our film," he explained.
That immersive approach didn't stop at the script or the setting; it also meant putting Pitt behind the wheel. "He was all in," Kosinski confirmed. "By the end of the film, we could not get him out of the car. He was having way too much fun."
There's a pivotal moment shot at the Belgian Grand Prix, which features one of the sport's most dangerous corners. Pitt couldn't hide his excitement, which was a problem given the context of the scene.
'It's called Eau Rouge ... and every time Brad went through that corner, he had a big smile,' Kosinski recalled. 'I had to remind him over the radio that it was a tense scene, and please, do not smile as you go through it. He had a blast shooting this movie — and lucky for me, he was just a natural talent when it came to driving. That was something that you really can't teach. He kind of had that from the beginning, and that's how we were able to pull this all off.'
Of course, no summer blockbuster is complete without a little heat, and in F1, that spark comes from the tension between Sonny and the team's technical director Kate McKenna, played by Kerry Condon.
"I really wanted Kerry's character to be an integral part of the plot," Kosinski said. "Which is why she's the team technical director, right at the center of everything.' But Kosinski shared that it was crucial not to force a romantic storyline. "It's got to be integral to the story," he insisted. The dynamic between driver and engineer gave the director a natural way to build some chemistry.
'When a Formula One team is losing, the drivers tend to blame the car, and the engineers tend to blame the driver,' he continued. 'I thought that was a great place of tension to start a relationship from — and see how they work through their workplace differences to find a connection.'
On the surface, it may seem like Kosinski's secret sauce is simple: movie stars, action and a splash of romance. But there's always something deeper under the hood.
Yes, F1 has race cars. Top Gun brought the roar of planes and motorcycles. Twisters — well, besides Mother Nature's fury — has a pickup truck. His upcoming Miami Vice? Probably boats. (His laugh after pointing that out indicated that's likely a yes.) But despite the heavy machinery that seems to follow him from film to film, Kosinski expressed that's not what makes a summer movie click.
'For me, it's more about the world,' he said. 'When I go to the movies, I want to disappear into this world created by the director and see it through their point of view, go on an adventure and come out the other side with maybe a new understanding or a new point of view about something I would have never known about.'
Kosinki hopes he achieved that with F1. Give him two-and-half-hours of your time, and he'll take you on a ride. 'You don't need to know anything about racing to enjoy this film. You're going to learn what you need to, meet some incredible characters and get a sense of what it's like to do something only 20 people in the world get to do every weekend.'