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Brad Pitt’s F1 movie is one of those projects we have been watching for quite some time, and so it’s safe to say we’re all more than a little excited about the upcoming 2025 movie at this point. In less than a year, we’ll be watching as the massive box office draw and Fight Club and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star takes on the role of an aging Formula 1 driver who gets back onto the race track.
Below is a breakdown of everything we know about F1 right now, including its release date, its stacked cast, the first trailer, and how the creative minds behind Top Gun: Maverick and other massive action films crafted what could very well be one of the biggest of next year’s blockbusters. Start your engines!
What Is The F1 Release Date?
The Summer 2025 blockbuster season is shaping up to be one for the ages, and in the middle of it all will be F1, which is slated to hit the big screen on June 27, 2025. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and Apple Original Films, the upcoming Brad Pitt movie will open against M3GAN 2.0, while also competing with 28 Years Later, Ballerina, Mission: Impossible 8, and several other highly anticipated titles slated for release in the weeks leading up to its debut.
After competing for box office supremacy with other movies like Jurassic World 4, James Gunn’s Superman, and the MCU’s The Fantastic Four, F1 will eventually be available for anyone with an Apple TV+ subscription. Apple TV+ movies like Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, and Argylle all debuted on the service a couple of months after their respective theatrical releases so we can probably expect the same in this case, but no streaming date has been announced yet.
The F1 Cast
Like a lot of the other great racing movies over the years, the F1 cast is full of star power, even when you look beyond the Hollywood megastar leading the pack. Here’s who we can expect to see when the movie premieres.
Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes
Brad Pitt will lead the F1 cast as Sonny Hayes, a one-time Formula 1 star who returns to the racing league years after getting caught up in a horrible crash that resulted in him prematurely retiring.
Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce
Damson Idris, who made a name for himself on shows like Snowfall, Black Mirror, and The Twilight Zone, will be taking on the role of Joshua Pearce, an up-and-coming driver and Sonny’s Formula 1 teammate upon his return to racing.
Apple Original Films has also announced that the following actors will also appear in the F1 cast though their characters’ names have not yet been revealed. For the time being, we’ll list them below:
- Javier Bardem
- Kerry Condon
- Tobias Menzies
- Kim Bodnia
- Shea Whigham
- Sarah Niles
- Samson Kayo
What Is F1 About?
When F1 hits the big screen in Summer 2025, it will follow racing legend Sonny Hayes as he gets back into his racing suit and behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car to be the driving force of the struggling APXGP team and the mentor of an up-and-coming hotshot driver. Based on everything Apple has said about the movie and shown off so far, it looks like Brad Pitt’s character will have a lot to work through as he gets back on the circuit that nearly took everything from him decades earlier.
The F1 Trailer
We will have to wait a while longer before we get to see the final cut of F1, but Apple and Warner Bros. gave the world its first proper look at the upcoming racing film with the release of the teaser trailer in July 2024. When the trailer was first released, we drew comparisons to Top Gun: Maverick and after checking it out you can probably see what we meant:
Throwing caution (and safety) out the window, the 97-second teaser set to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” doesn’t waste any time introducing the heart-pounding action and white-knuckle turns of Formula 1 racing while introducing several of the key figures that’ll be featured in the movie, including Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes. And if the movie is half as intense as the trailer leads one to believe, we’re in for one hell of a ride.
F1 Was Directed By Joseph Kosinski
Joseph Kosinski, whose recent credits include Top Gun: Maverick, as well as coming up with the story for the 2024 box office smash that was Twisters, could have yet another big hit on his hands with F1. The filmmaker behind movies like Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and Only the Brave, seems to be going all out for his next directorial effort, and we have reason to believe it will be just as fun and exhilarating as anything he’s done in the past.
F1 Incorporated The Same Technology As Top Gun: Maverick, Only Improved
The cameras and other technology used in Top Gun: Maverick made the Tom Cruise epic not only one of the best films of 2022 but also one of the best action movies of all time, and it sounds like Joseph Kosinski is using similar yet more advanced tech with F1. When speaking with Deadline in July 2024, the director revealed that the production team worked with Sony to create smaller and lighter cameras that were mounted on the race cars giving the camera team a lot of control of the movement.
No longer locked into fixed positions like the ones in Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski and his team were able to have “real-time control of panning and focusing” while shooting on various tracks.
The Movie Was Shot During Grand Prix Weekends And Features Real F1 Drivers
If the footage from the F1 trailer looks more authentic than your standard racing movie, it could have something to do with the fact that portions of it were shot at actual Formula 1 Grand Prix weekends throughout 2023, Apple has announced. Not only that, but racing stars like Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz Jr., Sergio Pérez, Fernando Alonso and Benoit Treluyer are also set to appear in the movie.
In fact, Hamilton, who has won seven Formula 1 world championships since entering the circuit more than a decade-and-a-half ago, was instrumental in the development of the film and one of the biggest reasons it’s coming to fruition.
What Is F1’s Rating?
F1 doesn’t have a rating yet (its release is about a year away at the time of this writing), but based on similar movies released over the years, we can speculate about how things will turn out. Previous racing films like Gran Turismo and Ford v Ferrari were both rated PG-13 so it would be a shock if it had anything besides that rating. There have been others like Rush with an R-rating in the past, but with F1 being released during the busy summer season, Apple and Warner Bros. are surely going to want as many eyes as possible watching the new movie and a PG-13 rating will give it a better chance than if it were rated R.
Expect to hear much more about F1 in the coming weeks and months. But while we wait, there are still plenty of great upcoming 2024 movies arriving in theaters throughout the year.