Why the Brad Pitt film is actually F1’s Barbie moment

“B7… miss. C2… miss. F1… hit?” Battleship might seem like an unusual place for a Formula 1 column that references Barbie in its headline, but the links are intrinsic.

Many a childhood hour/tantrum might’ve been given over to playing the board game, but have you ever heard of the 2012 film of the same name, Battleship? Given it was a commercial and critical flop, possibly not. Barbie, however, is a world-renowned toy and, a year from its opening, a global box office hit movie.

Enter F1, the staggeringly route one name for Apple’s Jerry Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinski-helmed, Brad Pitt-starring, Lewis Hamilton co-scripted Formula 1 film.

F1 the global motorsport remains at its core an obsession with expensive, amazing, toys. And with this officially endorsed, access-all-areas production, our hyperbolic Venn diagram is complete. Because F1 is another entry in Hollywood’s current obsession with intellectual property (IP) efforts.

According to The Rest is Entertainment podcast, to whom this column owes a considerable debt of gratitude, only three of the top 50 films of the last 10 years have not been an IP movie of some sort. The comic book-based superhero movies top the bill, now the toy story market is exploding in a very different way to those beloved Pixar movies and a decade on from Battleship’s failure.

Mattel’s push to sell the film rights to Barbie eventually resulted in last summer’s smash hit, along with the very successful co-marketing embrace with Oppenheimer. Mattel’s Hot Wheels scale model toy car business is soon set to get its own movie makeover via JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot production company. Plenty of other toy series have sold movie rights of late.

Will Pitt's affiliation with the F1 movie make it an unmissable prospect as Barbie proved to be?

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

It's in this zeitgeist thrust – intertwined firmly with our society’s long love for reproductions and familiar themes, a la 1966’s Grand Prix and 1971’s Le Mans – that Formula 1’s film will reside.

That alone explains the production’s essentially eponymous title – revealed over the recent British Grand Prix weekend. F1 the championship wants F1 the film to wave everything its IP contains at potential new customers. Anyone hoping for something a little more ‘Faster than the Speed of Love’ so trips towards a chasm of disappointment.

Barbie succeeded critically and commercially for multiple reasons. Its cast – with Margot Robbie as lead star and co-producer, and Greta Gerwig as writer and director – was guaranteed to generate interest. F1 with Brad Pitt as its lead star is hoping for something similar.

F1 is hoping the movie will swell its consumer base and make it less niche. It’s simply the next step on the ‘Drive to Survive’ marketing journey enacted under Liberty Media

But two other particular elements ensured Barbie’s success. The first was its massive reach thanks to its existing position in millions of homes around the world. The second was the strength of its story – about what it meant to be a woman in the 20th century compared to now and what Barbie dolls represented throughout their history.

Here, F1 has snags the championship is hoping will resolve one more than the other. The championship and the film’s producers are hailing it as utterly “authentic” – hence the access granted to the fictional Apex GP team at Silverstone and elsewhere. The story is going to live in the real 2023/2024 F1 sporting world, with the scripted characters ‘racing’ Max Verstappen, Hamilton and co.

But its central premise is flawed. Former F1 drivers racing in other categories in their 50s (and Pitt is 60 in real life) just never get tempted back to compete at motorsport’s pinnacle. A cliche, within a cliche, if you will.

And, per the film’s Silverstone-released teaser (yes, there is apparently a difference between that 90-second clip and the full trailer still to come), F1 drivers don’t ask team staff to compromise car design safety for performance reasons in the 2020s.

Watch: F1 | Official Teaser

But in getting audiences to take their popcorn into this story, F1 is hoping F1 will swell its consumer base and make it less niche. It’s simply the next step on the ‘Drive to Survive’ marketing journey enacted under Liberty Media.

Bernie Ecclestone might’ve hoped similar about early involvement with Sylvester Stallone's Driven, but that utterly bombed and was about Champ Car anyway, let alone possessing DTS’s reach with a different audience than the traditional motorsport fan.

Now, to a certain extent and Autosport’s self-loathing over F1 reality (Brands Hatch being substituted for Paul Ricard in Rush still rankles!) aside, starting from a smaller awareness position compared to Barbie’s doesn’t matter. Again, because F1 is purely about swelling that consumer base within a different medium of storytelling.

‘Toyetic’ films are about subsequent sales of related merchandise. For F1, this means future ticket sales and race viewing numbers that convert to advertising cash.

A big part of this whole project is the tie-up with Apple as F1’s co-producer and distributor. Once it’s had its theatrical run next summer, the film is going to be released on Apple TV+. That means it’ll sit available each day in an undoubtedly prominent spot on screens for 25 million potential viewers. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon biopic got this treatment, after all.

Here it’s worth considering how one of Apple’s core products sits in the pockets of over a billion people too – something that could well be utilised to promote F1. After all, it’s in Apple’s interest for the project to succeed, around what are rumoured to be ballooning costs.

The F1 teaser was all very Academy Award winner (for Best Sound, in 2023) Top Gun: Maverick and showcasing F1 speeds. The two share Bruckheimer and Kosinski as producer and director after all.

And so, while Autosport understands other titles were considered for this film, even if the story fails to match the project’s ever-increasing hype, the possibility of the phrase “And the Oscar goes to… F1” one day being uttered explains everything about its existence.

Hopes that the film will increase eyeballs on the real world of F1 may bring other benefits too

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images