Apple’s High-Octane Blockbuster Is Coming to Theaters Soon | Here’s the Latest Trailer
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A film that’s shaping up to be one of Apple’s biggest hits — and possibly a make-or-break moment for its theatrical film ambitions — is scheduled to hit the big just over six weeks from now.
Apple has released a second trailer for the Brad Pitt-fueled F1 racing drama, which will arrive in theaters on June 27, 2025. Officially announced last summer, the film will put Pitt into the F1 racing circuit as Sonny Hayes, an aging racer who comes out of retirement to mentor a younger driver and win one last big race.
Dubbed “the greatest that never was,” Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) was FORMULA 1’s most promising phenom of the 1990s until an accident on the track nearly ended his career. Thirty years later, he’s a nomadic racer-for-hire when he’s approached by his former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), owner of a struggling FORMULA 1 team that is on the verge of collapse. Ruben convinces Sonny to come back to FORMULA 1 for one last shot at saving the team and being the best in the world. He’ll drive alongside Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the team’s hotshot rookie intent on setting his own pace. But as the engines roar, Sonny’s past catches up with him and he finds that in FORMULA 1, your teammate is your fiercest competition—and the road to redemption is not something you can travel alone.
Produced by Pitt, Jerry Bruckheimer of Top Gun fame, and seven-time Formula 1 champ Lewis Hamilton, F1 is also remarkable for having been shot at several actual F1 events, where director Joseph Kosinski applied his talent for filming dogfights in Top Gun: Maverick to fast-paced Formula 1 racing to give it a level of realism never before seen in racing films. “We want everyone to love it and to really feel that we encapsulate what the essence of this sport is all about,” Hamilton said last year in an interview with Formula One.
A High-Stakes Game
The pressure isn’t just on for Hayes in the film. F1 is the culmination of a movie deal the company signed with the A-list actor three years ago, but it’s fair to say that a lot has changed since then, and the stakes are now much higher for Apple.
In 2022, Apple’s Hollywood ambitions were at their zenith. Only two months after signing Pitt on — for a second film deal, no less — Apple would clean up at the Oscars with three history Academy Awards for CODA, becoming the first streaming service to win the coveted Best Picture Oscar, handily beating out more established rivals like Netflix.
Apple TV+ had also already made Emmy Award history in its first year of operation for its debut series, The Morning Show, and repeated that in 2021 with four Emmy Awards for Ted Lasso, including Outstanding Comedy Series, plus the most nominations ever received by a freshman comedy series, beating the previous record held by Glee.
For a while, Apple seemed to be unstoppable. A year earlier, it had already signed another deal with Pitt and George Clooney for “a robust theatrical release,” pairing up the Ocean’s Eleven alum in starring roles for the first time since 2008’s Burn After Reading.
However, those deals seemed like almost a footnote next to other luminaries like Tom Hanks, who came to Apple TV+ for the highly successful Greyhound and returned with Finch, plus a deal with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio on Killers of the Flower Moon and Will Smith for Emancipation.
Although Greyhound never landed on the big screen due to the COVID-19 pandemic (which was the only reason Apple got it in the first place), the plan was for the others to be big theatrical releases that would make Apple even more of a mover and shaker in Hollywood.
In early 2023, sources reported that Apple planned to spend $1 billion per year on blockbuster theatrical movie releases. True to its word, it spent $700 million to bring Killers of the Flower Moon, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and the star-studded spy thriller Argylle to the big screen. Each followed a typical box office release schedule, running exclusively in theaters for several weeks before coming to premium video-on-demand (PVOD) services and then finally to Apple TV+.
Sadly, the box office take for all three films together was only $466 million. Apple likely still broke even, thanks to sales on PVOD services like Amazon and iTunes, as well as new Apple TV+ sign-ups, but they certainly weren’t profitable undertakings. Variety called Argylle, in particular, an “unmitigated disaster, with a $200 million price tag and only $88 million in box office revenue.
So, following reports that Apple was tightening the purse strings for its production budgets, it wasn’t a big surprise to find it was also scaling back on big theatrical releases. Plans for a wide theatrical release of the Clooney-Pitt film, Wolfs, were nixed in favor of a limited run — a move which blindsided the filmmaker, Jon Watts, resulting in him pulling out of a sequel because he “no longer trusted [Apple] as a creative partner.”
Apple’s revised film strategy is to focus on only one or two big-budget blockbusters each year, of which F1 is expected to be this year’s entry. With a reported production budget of more than $300 million, it’s Apple’s most expensive film project to date, which means it really needs to be a big hit to validate Apple’s continued filmmaking efforts — at least for the big screen.
