Everything F1's risking with its new movie

The official title of the upcoming Brad Pitt-led Formula 1 movie - F1 - is something that lends itself quite easily to jibes about a lack of imagination.

But it is so clearly not, and ahead of its 2025 release, F1 being chosen as the name actively heightens both the risk and the reward of grand prix racing's unprecedented pop cultural undertaking.

Movies don't really sink or swim on the strength of titles alone, although, if you were to hear it from, for example, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, the name The Shawshank Redemption was a major factor in the now-acclaimed and universally beloved 1994 release initially stumbling badly at the box office.

Calling the F1 movie F1 will not cause it to bomb. From a purely financial standpoint, it feels almost guaranteed to help the movie's bottom line: a short, sharp, memorable title that causes no confusion and instantly identifies the movie with what it's about and who's backing it.

But that's also very much part of the gamble here. Calling it F1 raises the stakes.

Rush is an F1 movie. John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, using real F1 racing footage and featuring all sorts of other authentic aspects of motorsport, is an F1 movie. This new one is intended to be the F1 movie. Its logo is the logo of Formula 1, its name is the name of Formula 1.

They could have called it Apex, or Lights Out, or Overtake: The F1 Story, or anything like that, and instead F1, which is notoriously protective about its image rights and name, has allowed it to link directly, unambiguously, to the championship.

In doing so, it will maximise the reach it can have. If you're looking for new audiences, in an effort to repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle effect of Drive to Survive, this is the right way to go about it. It perhaps risks making it more marketing material than art - the kind of accusation that can be not unreasonably levied at, say, Greta Gerwig's pop cultural behemoth Barbie - but that's not an accusation that will keep F1 figures awake at night.

But that direct link between movie and championship, between the film product and the sporting product, is only worth anything if it's good and successful. If it's not, then what would've otherwise been just a run-of-the-mill marketing misfire becomes a genuine source of embarrassment.

The good signs

Director Joseph Kosinski is three for five in terms of delivering massive box office successes from his feature-length projects.

Sci-fi fare Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, while met with a general shrug from critics, both did well at the box office. Top Gun: Maverick absolutely raked it in - but was also a massive crowd-pleaser and as big of a critical darling as that kind of movie ever gets, which was reflected in an honest-to-goodness Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.

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On the flipside, firefighter drama Only the Brave bombed at the box office - despite being Kosinski's most cohesive work before Maverick - and the Netflix-distributed Spiderhead didn't exactly make a massive pop cultural splash. This column is very likely the first you hear of it, despite the fact it stars Thor's Chris Hemsworth.

But three out of five isn't bad, and even Kosinski's more uneven work has consistently shown off a flair for the visual.

F1 will want its movie to look as good as possible, emphasising the visual spectacle of the sport - after all, that's why you allow all that race weekend filming. And Kosinski movies - all five of them made in cooperation with Oscar-nominated (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Oscar-winning (Life of Pi) cinematographer Claudio Miranda - are consistently visually compelling.

F1 fans have got their fair share of laughs out of the live filming that's gone on at grand prix weekends and the various production elements ending up on full display of the public as a consequence, but the flipside of that is that we have basically total confidence that the actual racing part of the movie will look fantastic.

The care and expense put into the filming methods proves it, the proof-of-concept footage in the teaser trailer proves it - and, of course, what Kosinski and Miranda did with fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick proves it, too.

It also has a genuine Hollywood A-lister attached in Brad Pitt, of course, and Pitt still both has pull and talent (having won his first Oscar four years ago for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). But his presence is no automatic guarantee of box office success, and it would be negligent not to mention that his public image has taken a significant hit as a consequence of legal disputes with ex-wife Angelina Jolie.

Instead, the racing footage is the headline star and the movie's raison d'etre, and the deftness with which the movie will be built around those racing scenes is what it will live or die by.

The question marks

The only bit of dialogue that's officially come out of the movie so far is this:

- OK - Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston, now McLaren, all have the speeds on the straights. Our shot is battling in the turns. We need to build our car for combat.
- How am I supposed to make that safe?
- Who said anything about 'safe'?

Anybody with even a passing knowledge of F1 realities will recognise that as primo nonsense, which isn't necessarily damning by itself - the F1 movie does not need to get into the intricacies of F1 car design to be worthwhile as art or marketing.

But there's a difference between dialogue that's technically inauthentic and dialogue that's perfunctory, and even if the above might well not be in the movie (it's not uncommon for trailers to feature snippets or entire scenes that then hit the cutting room floor in final post-production), it's not massively encouraging as a best-foot-forward.

The sole credited writer on the F1 movie is Ehren Kruger, best known until 2022 for American adaptations of The Ring and Ghost in the Shell and Michael Bay's Transformers sequels. None of those were exactly award-winning material - but Top Gun: Maverick, which Kruger wrote for, is.

It even has a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination and while the real strengths of the movie lie elsewhere, they are underpinned by a solid-to-good script.

That, though, is a high watermark that the F1 movie will need to reach, and it will need to do so without the involvement of two central Maverick figures: Tom Cruise, who always has a lot of creative input on his projects, and Cruise's ever-present script partner Christopher McQuarrie.

In F1's case, it is known Lewis Hamilton has had input in maintaining the authenticity of the racing scenes in his role as a producer - but those are the ones to be concerned about the least.

The movie, of course, does not need to be a masterpiece of dialogue and narration to bring in the money - but its status as a tentpole release directly linked to an existing worldwide brand means box office success is just one part of the formula, the others being positive critical reception and positive audience reception.

And, OK, the critical reception is the least important cog here, but to succeed in bringing F1 to new audiences, to encourage them to both spread word of mouth and to learn more about the sport and tune in, the movie has to be liked. Widely liked. And that means it has to be good at more things than one.

Whether The Shawshank Redemption was sabotaged by its title or not - and maybe you're somebody like me who comes from a country where the translation of that complicated title botched things further by outright spoiling a major plot beat from the movie - you watch it today with total confidence that it was always going to end up a revered classic, whatever the title.

F1's name has it set up for instant payoff. The hard part is making sure that doesn't backfire - with a movie that's able to cash the checks its name, representing 75 seasons of one of the world's most prestigious and exciting competitions, is signing.