You could argue that, as a sport, every race in the Formula One calendar is its own self-contained movie. The locations are mostly glamorous, the cast of characters is varied and handsome, there are heroes and villains, and action aplenty. That’s the vibe that was so ingeniously mined by Netflix’s Drive to Survive, the ultra-glossy quasi-reality show turbocharging the sport’s appeal, particularly in America, for years the F1 refusenik.
F1: The Movie takes all that equity and fires it into the stratosphere. This is F1’s unabashed love letter to itself, a licensed product in a similar vein to the wildly successful Barbie movie. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ll know that the film’s cast and crew inserted themselves into the F1 world championship during 2023 and ’24, lining up on the grid at Silverstone, Monza and Abu Dhabi, amongst others, and generally doing a remarkable job of blurring real life with fantasy. Was that Brad Pitt in the media pen high-fiving Fernando Alonso after a Grand Prix? Yes it was.
