Will Brad Pitt's New "F1' Be Yet Another Near Career-Killing F1 Movie?

Motor Trend

2 days ago

At first blush, it seems like a no-brainer: Put one of Hollywood's biggest stars behind the wheel of a race car in one of the world's most popular forms of motorsport, turn on the camera, and make a billion dollars. This was no doubt the guiding philosophy behind the imaginatively titled F1, a flick starring Brad Pitt and helmed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, which has been in production since mid-2023.
0:00 / 0:00
Dig a little deeper, however, and troubling details emerge. There's the fact Pitt, at 62 years old, is stretching the limits of believability for a veteran driver returning to a sport after years away to mentor a younger pilot (F1 has only ever had one winner above the age of 50, and only two in their late 40s). Moving beyond the plot, however, there's also the reported $300 million budget, a number that pushes F1 past the level of tentpole entries in the Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park franchises.
From a marketing perspective, it's safe to assume that dinosaurs and Jedi have a wider appeal than graybeards in an open-wheel car. Consider, too, that race fans can see actual drivers hit the track in real high-stakes Formula 1 competition, for free, every Sunday during the season, without having to shell out for a ticket (something that's not true when it comes to Jack Sparrow and the Skywalker crew).
If only Pitt's producers had done their homework, they might have been able to avoid financial heartache altogether. You see, this isn't the first time a superstar has tried their hand at making Formula 1 a springboard to box office success. Don't believe us when we say open-wheel racing doesn't always equal big-ticket sales? Let us introduce you to the Al Pacino F1 movie you've never heard of: Bobby Deerfield.
Let's Go Racing Napping
In the mid-1970s, it's easy to argue that Pacino was at the height of his powers, coming off star turns in two blockbuster Godfather movies as well as critically acclaimed performances in both Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. It was a run that seemingly suggested the Italian-American superstar could do no wrong when it came to picking projects, and all signs pointed toward continued success when it was announced that his next project would have him assuming the mantle of a winning Formula 1 driver.
Racing pictures hadn't historically been a sure thing. Although John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix had done big business 10 years earlier, the Steve McQueen vehicle Le Mans flopped financially at the beginning of the 1970s. Still, this was superstar Pacino teaming up with future Oscar-winning director Sidney Pollack, which is as close to printing money as you could get in that cinematic decade.
In the film, the titular Bobby Deerfield, played by Pacino with a startling level of reserve, is knocked off his game by the death of a teammate during a race in Europe. Ostensibly, the story centers around his investigation into what happened on the circuit, but this is a movie that takes significant sidetracks into his own emotional response to the situation, as well as his affair with a dying woman who cares more about hot air balloons than winning on Sunday.
Herein lies the greatest problem with Deerfield: It's dull. Amazingly, a movie that that employed the services of legendary drivers including James Hunt and Mario Andretti in its action sequences (with Jose Carlos Pace doubling for Pacino) will lull you to sleep during the incredible gaps between those snippets of competition (which were filmed in conjunction with actual F1 events).
Pollack shot the racing paddock with aggressive intimacy, taking us into the cockpit with racers as they prepare for the green flag, and the atmosphere surrounding each race is believably electric, but the sojourns there are all too brief. Instead, much of the movie consists of Pacino moping around Italy behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo, itself not necessarily a bad time were he ever allowed to smile or perhaps speak above a whisper.
Dude, Where's My Racing?
Audiences felt hoodwinked by the movie's marketing, which was heavy on the fast and furious F1 fun and remarkably light on the deep exploration of 1970s angst. Most critics agreed, and theatergoers stayed away in droves once bad press and word of mouth linked up to sink Bobby Deerfield's box-office take below $10 million.
The movie was quickly forgotten, and despite Pacino having spoken fondly of the experience of making it, it's been almost entirely memory-holed by his PR team whenever a career retrospective comes around. It's not hard to understand why. It would be two years before the actor made another movie (1979's And Justice for All), and five years before he was back in blockbuster country (1983's Scarface). Deerfield was such a career derail that Scarface remained Pacino's most high-profile success until his Oscar-winning Scent of a Woman resurgence in 1992.
With both Pacino and McQueen burned by high-profile motorsports turkeys, racing movies that dared to flaunt the American stock car status quo were deemed largely toxic for the next 25 years. Burt Reynolds and Tom Cruise scored hits with NASCAR-themed efforts (Stroker Ace and Days of Thunder, respectively), and even Kenny Rogers sold tickets with his dirt-track exploits (the wonderfully absurd Six Pack), but open-wheel exploits proved anathema to the silver screen's biggest stars.
In the end, the only major name to tempt the Formula 1 gods post-Pacino-pre-Pitt was Sylvester Stallone. Never one to question the relationship between his reach and his grasp, in 2001 he hit theaters in Driven as an aging driver brought out of retirement to shepherd the career of a young upstart. Uh oh. That sounds oddly familiar.
The tiny percentage of you out there who have seen Driven are likely gnashing your teeth and shouting at the screen that the movie focused on Champ Car, not F1, which is correct. However, that venue shift only occurred because Stallone couldn't secure the financing required to set the movie in the series originally called for by the script. Even going with the cheaper series, Driven still took roughly $100 million to produce and market, and it earned just under half that in receipts.
Arriving during a fallow period for the actor, the movie put Stallone in box-office jail for another five years, when he managed to claw his way out by returning to the role that made him famous in 2006's Rocky Balboa. It also sank the idea that putting the racing at the forefront, rather than making it background dressing à la Deerfield, was the key to success.
Can Pitt Out-Market the F1 Machine?
Since Bobby Deerfield, there's been only one successful take on Formula 1 to make it into theaters. Unfortunately for Brad Pitt, there likely aren't any useful lessons to be learned from 2013's Rush, a low-budget (roughly 10 percent of the outlay of F1) flick that relied on pre-fame performances from actors like Chris Hemsworth and Olivia Wilde to tell the story of the rivalry and friendship between legendary racing alumnus James Hunt and Nikki Lauda.
If anything, Rush's ability to connect with an audience feels like a signpost for the troubles Pitt's upcoming release is potentially facing. Rather than going head to head with the glitz and glamor of the modern F1 circuit (which the sport is extremely successful at marketing even to non-fans in the form of its Drive to Survive Netflix series), Rush took audiences back to a time when media penetration of the track and trailer crowd was nowhere near the level it is today. And it portrayed real-life historic F1 heroes and storylines, something F1 also doesn't do.
It's a lot easier to inhabit an imaginary world for a couple of hours if you aren't intimately familiar with it. For Pitt's F1, on top of historic box-office apathy for open-cockpit adventures, the movie's main competition is the relentless, all-encompassing, 24/7 digital video blast of the $18 billion enterprise itself, and the personalities that inhabit it for more than just the summer blockbuster season. Seen from that perspective, the movie's $300 million budget suddenly starts to feel more than a little light.