Brad Pitt’s Need for Speed Fuels Apple’s 2025 F1 Racing Epic

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Nearly three years after signing Brad Pitt to a pair of movie deals, Apple is getting ready to bring the actor to the big screen in not one but two theatrical feature films.

The duo’s flagship is an Apple Original Formula 1 racing flick that will come to theatres next June as the company’s first summer blockbuster. It’s likely to be a more feel-good movie in the style of Top Gun: Maverick, seeing as how it’s directed by Joseph Kosinski and written by Ehren Kruger, some of the same folks who put that hit film together.

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Apple announced the untitled film’s release date last month, saying it will hit North American theatres on June 27, 2025. However, what’s incredibly unique about this project is that Apple made it in collaboration with Formula 1, conducting the filming on-location at races on F1 Grand Prix weekends.

That means real-world team racing will make up much of the film’s backdrop, which stars Brad Pitt as a former F1 driver who returns to the sport. He’s joined by Damson Idris (Snowfall), who plays his teammate on the fictional team APXGP, plus Kerry Condon ( The Banshees of Inisherin), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), Tobias Menzies (Game of Thrones), Sarah Niles (Ted Lasso), Kim Bodnia (Killing Eve) and Samson Kayo (Our Flag Means Death).

In addition to a wide theatrical release, this will be one of the few Apple Originals to also show in IMAX theatres, following Killers of the Flower Moon last year and a premiere screening of Sir David Attenborough’s Prehistoric Planet in 2022.

Despite announcing the film’s release date, Apple was unusually quiet about its title. However, it appears it was simply waiting for Formula 1 to make the announcement, which it did today: F1.

This was accompanied by a tweet from the official Formula 1 account, which shared that it will also be offering a sneak peek at the film this Sunday at the Formula 1 British Grand Prix.

https://twitter.com/F1/status/1809210637395849231

The movie stars Pitt as former Formula 1 driver Sonny Hayes, who is lured back to the sport to partner rookie team mate Joshua Pearce – played by Idris – at the fictional APXGP team.

Formula 1 adds that filming has not only already taken place at actual F1 events but will continue during this weekend’s British Grand Prix, making it an interesting synergy of both previewing and filming a movie at the same time.

F1 is being produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Brad Pitt, and Lewis Hamilton, a seven-time Formula 1 champion. Last July, Hamilton offered a teaser on the film’s progress, saying it’s “massively exciting to see it all coming together.”

We want everyone to love it and to really feel that we encapsulate what the essence of this sport is all about – that’s our goal and I hope we can do you proud.Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton also adds that Joseph Kosinski’s work on Top Gun: Maverick is key to realizing the film’s vision, which gives us a good hint of the kind of tone we can expect from F1:

Joe is an incredible director… You already saw what he’s done with fighter jets, what he did with Maverick, so if you just think about what he’s done with that in terms of the dogfights we saw on those jets, which was pretty epic…Lewis Hamilton

But First Comes ‘Wolfs’

Compared to the hype around F1, Pitt’s other Apple Originals project may be easy to miss. However, it still promises to be an exciting collaboration that reunites the actor with fellow Ocean’s 11 alum George Clooney in a film with a similar feel.

The film, Wolfs, is an action comedy that will arrive in theatres on September 20, and teams up Pitt and Clooney as two professional “fixers” who are hired separately to cover up a high-profile crime. The title stems from the fact that both are “lone wolves” forced to work together on the case.

Pitt and Clooney signed on with Apple in 2021 after the iPhone maker beat out Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. in a “feverish bidding war.” While there weren’t too many details back then, it was clear this was set to become one of Apple’s big theatrical releases, with the deal secured alongside Will Smith’s Emancipation, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and the spy thriller Argyle, all of which have since come and gone from theatres and landed on the smaller screen through Apple TV+.



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