'F1' Is The Future of Hollywood Blockbusters

#326: "F1," "The Bear," "The Rescuers Down Under," "The Order"

Edition 326:

Hey movie lovers, Happy Fourth of July!!

My last Friday movie newsletter of my 20s…can’t believe that.

This week: Fast cars go vroom in F1, an old school Hollywood blockbuster. TV’s splashiest release is far quieter, and a lesser known indie is better than either of them. Plus, my case for hand-drawn animation. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Ryan Gosling goes to space.

F1

A movie about an anachronistic, over-the-hill, risk-taking hero getting a second chance at the big leagues against a younger, next-gen rival, featuring high octane action, cheesy plotting and soaring music underneath…

Am I talking about F1 or Top Gun: Maverick?

I guess if you’re going run back the same formula twice, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski couldn’t have chosen a much better blueprint. There is perhaps no more of a unanimously triumphant example of blockbuster filmmaking in the last five years than Top Gun: Maverick, which printed nearly $1.5 billion at the box office, was beloved by everyone, and in the words of Steven Spielberg, “saved Hollywood’s ass.”

As I wrote back in 2022, that movie succeeded because it hit “the fan service jackpot,” giving people exactly what they wanted without a single cynical bone in its body and overwhelming the pleasure censors of any audience member who might stop to question that movie’s faceless enemy or nonsense mission. This is not a movie you analyze…it’s a movie you sit back and enjoy.

That’s the philosophy of F1 as well, beginning and ending with its lead actor. From the opening scene — almost a shot-for-shot recreation of Maverick’s opening swapping Tom Cruise for Brad Pitt and jet planes for race cars — Pitt is deified in much the same way Cruise was, shot with upward angles and backlighting, his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and his hair tousled just so.

He joins a last place Formula 1 team with a hotshot rookie (Damson Idris) and the mandate to win one of the handful of remaining races so that the owner (Javier Bardem) doesn’t have to sell to the big bad board. From there, you can basically come up with the entire plot.

The movie’s strength is its obviousness. The sport of Formula 1 is actually, literally, rocket science. Major plot points revolve around race strategy as specific as tire pressures, air resistance and pit stop timing, nuances that could quite easily confuse or even bore all non-fans, so the movie relies heavily on its ability to dumb down scenes to very basic and well-worn tropes like the underdog, the cheater, the cocky brat, etc. Pitt’s character has soul because he jogs around the track bouncing tennis balls, as opposed to the kid who runs on a treadmill with an altitude mask on. Silly, but clear.

It’s storytelling straight out of the 1980s, complete with soundtrack needle drops as obvious as “We Will Rock You” and Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” And guess what…it works! Here’s the appeal I’ve made dozens of times — people are over the ironic detachment of modern fourth-wall-breaking cleverness and ready to get back to good ol’ fashioned earnestness. We want Pitt to get vulnerable talking about how racing feels like flying! We wants fireworks overhead as he crosses the finish line!

It’s totally inoffensive, accessible, predictable fun. And there’s very little pressure on any of those storylines to be good — the rivalry, the romance between Pitt and his coworker (Kerry Condon), the team ownership drama between Bardem and Tobias Menzies, and so on — because they are all just decorations hung on the tree that is the racing itself.

Everyone involved in this movie was far more interested in capturing authentic looking race footage than the surrounding scenes, up to and including Pitt (he’s said as much in interviews), who really falls flat with his performance in several of the emotional dialogue scenes but carries himself convincingly as an F1 driver.

Few will give that a second thought when they see these racing scenes, which are incredible. Kosinski’s camera technology that strapped cameras to jet planes in Maverick was upgraded to fit Formula 1 cars and provide the most breathtaking footage of high speed racing ever recorded — including rotating cameras that show the faces of drivers and then spin to show race action on the sides and front of the car at nearly 200mph.

Seen in a theater experience like IMAX, it’s a pulse-pounding experience. The movie knows it, and spends well over half of its 2hr35min runtime jumping from race to race and showing as much time on the track as it possibly can.

The real criticism of the movie, and what confirms it as a class below Maverick, is the fact that the movie is really a two-and-a-half hour commercial. In exchange for incredible access to real life tracks, drivers and facilities, Formula 1 gets the best promotion it’s seen since Netflix’s “Drive To Survive.” The soundtrack is littered with pop hits from today’s buzziest artists. And as I wrote about for Forbes, the brand promotion doesn’t stop there…more than a dozen brands share the spotlight, which is impossible not to notice.

Ladies and gentlemen, this sure looks to me like the future of blockbuster filmmaking. If the comic book dynasty is finally coming to a close (this month’s Superman and Fantastic Four will determine that for sure), then the next evolution sure looks like the exploitation of big, well known brands like Barbie or F1 that can be given the cinematic treatment, partially funded by product tie-ins, brand integrations and company copromotion.

Not every single one of those will be handled with the professional craft that Bruckheimer and Kosinski possess, but if big, dumb blockbuster filmmaking can promise to always be this fun, I’m willing to ride along into this next era.

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Something New

The Bear S4 (Hulu): Season 1 surprised everyone; Season 2 stole our hearts; then Season 3 deflated our sky-high expectations. The narrative at the time was that the show was hobbled by its own success — asked to stretch from a planned three seasons into four, thus leading to excessive throat clearing in a third season that didn’t really go anywhere. We were told that Season 4 was filmed concurrently, to accommodate the now-busy schedules of the ascendant cast, and that it would right all wrongs.

The visual stylings of co-showrunner Chris Storer, who directs most episodes, are as virtuosic as ever, but I’m five episodes into season five, and have the same complaints (and it’s hard not to tie this to the announcement of a season five last week). Things like cross-cutting between pedestrian scenes to add suspense, long montage sequences over music, extended flashbacks…these are now parts of the show’s framework.

Now, all longer-running shows tend to become caricatures of themselves (“Ted Lasso” immediately comes to mind). But the impact of characters carrying the enormous weight of grief and regret while reflecting on past mistakes, and relying on some syrupy sentimentality to save the day, doesn’t hit with the same impact as it did a few years ago. And that cast, no doubt the show’s strength, now commands each of nearly a dozen characters to have their own arc and screen time (not to mention tons of star cameos), which gives the season less structural clarity about where it’s headed.

We complain about this show because we know what it’s capable of, and even in the episodes I’ve seen, there have been a handful of moments that are better than anything on TV all year. Heck, even the low points are still on a level most other shows would dream of. I’ll watch every episode hoping it turns the corner and re-finds the level of its past glory.

Something Old

The Rescuers Down Under (1990, Disney+): As mind-blowingly good as digital animation has gotten in recent years, there’s just something special about hand-drawn animation that oozes with infinite creativity. Special thanks to reader Smith L. for the invite to see this movie on film at Quentin Tarintino’s New Beverly Cinema. It was a screening packed with little kids yelling back to the screen, especially every time John Candy’s giant bird character spoke (I swear Candy is an absolute cheat code for voice acting…I’d put him on the Mount Rushmore with Robin Williams).

For a movie that is so obviously targeted to kids, this movie doesn’t shy away from darker themes. The plot is literally about a poacher hunting down a rare bird in the Australian outback, who keeps dozens of anthropomorphized animals caged up in his basement. It’s amazing what you can get away with in the name of cuteness when you have little mice delivering the dialogue.

I’d never seen or even heard of this movie before but having seen it I think it’s as good as anything Disney has put out in the 30 years since, and holds up just as well as any of those classics.

Something To Stream

The Order (Hulu): One of the lessons of last year’s Longlegs was just how fertile the setting and aesthetic of rural America could be for crime mysteries (the other was how important having a good trailer is…which The Order also nailed). But where that movie leaned into hardcore horror, this one stays with historical fiction in tracking the FBI’s investigation of an Aryan Nation splinter group in the 1980s planning domestic terrorist acts.

Justin Kurzel’s directorial style is often more style over substance (Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed and The True History of the Kelly Gang are all beautiful and mostly empty), and the world he’s created here is gorgeously rendered, each smokey bar and sprawling vista highlighting the dueling themes of confinement and independence.

Luckily for Kurzel, this narrative is very straightforward cat-and-mouse, with a world-weary Jude Law killing it as the agent chasing charismatic crazy man Nicholas Hoult, both high points in their recent careers. While there may not be many twists and turns, the drama is compelling and the heist and action set pieces are really exciting. It’s a top 10 movie for me in 2025 so far, and I highly recommend.

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Trailer Watch: Project Hail Mary

I recently read this book, on the recommendation of loyal reader Collin D., who says it is his favorite book of all time — an Andy Weir ‘man stuck in space’ story not all that dissimilar from his other bestseller, The Martian. I thought the book was excellent, but I told Collin there were a lot of moments that I couldn’t imagine being adapted on screen.

Those fears were dispelled at CinemaCon in March, when apparently several minutes of footage from this movie were shown and wow’d audiences. Since then I’ve been waiting for this trailer to launch, to see how Ryan Gosling embodied the astronaut charged with saving humanity. No surprise, he crushed it. Hoping this will be a major blockbuster in 2026.