Befitting its title-trademarked affiliation with the world’s most popular motorsport, F1®: The Movie features Brad Pitt as a fallen Formula One star who upshifts back from career oblivion and personal wreckage to the pinnacle of racing. Mentoring a young upstart (Damson Idris), his character sulks, schemes, and preens in heavily branded safety overalls, looking extremely cool screaming down the straightaway at 233 miles per hour. Formula One is a young man’s sport, however, and the viewer is constantly reminded of the sheer implausibility of even a sexy sexagenarian like Pitt maneuvering behind the wheel of a high-performance road rocket.
Apple, the entertainment conglomerate that produced F1, similarly finds itself competing on a grander track and at a higher level than anyone might reasonably expect at this point. Following a string of theatrically distributed flops (Fly Me to the Moon, Argylle), financially underperforming prestige plays (Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon), and the first straight-to-streaming Best Picture Oscar winner (Apple TV+’s CODA), F1 marks Apple’s first foray into big-budget summer-blockbuster territory. Spending nearly a quarter-billion dollars to produce a literal star vehicle for Pitt that has become known inside and outside the industry as “Top Gun in a race car,” the tech behemoth now finds itself revving into a higher gear that could ultimately pump up — or deflate the tires on — its future multiplex ambitions.
While Apple senior executives have remained publicly loath to hinge Apple’s future release strategy on the box-office performance of any single film, people who have done business with the Cupertino company say it’s in search of big theatrical hits — if for no other reason than to boost subscription and viewership numbers on Apple TV+ and burnish its rep for coveted electronics. “The hope is that there’s a halo effect around theatrical releases,” says one insider who has mounted projects with Apple’s original-film co-chiefs Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg and consulted with Apple’s senior vice-president of services, Eddy Cue. “Unlike Netflix, there is a halo effect where the consumer feels like they’re getting something of value. And they just want to associate Apple TV with things of quality as much as possible. If you can make the consumer think of quality across the board with iPads, iPhones, watches, and then Apple TV and movies that are all super-cool and high-quality, it uplifts the entire enterprise.” (Apple declined Vulture’s request to interview Erlicht and Van Amburg.)
But even while reviews for F1 have been overwhelmingly positive and the two-and-a-half-hour race thriller is predicted to top all other wide-release movies this weekend, pulling in somewhere between $45 million and $55 million domestically, profitability remains something of a long shot. Given the film’s $250 million–ish price tag — with Pitt reportedly being paid around $20 million as well as a portion of F1’s gross revenues as a producer — and a global prints-and-advertising spend in the neighborhood of $150 million to $175 million, F1’s break-even point will be north of a billion dollars, industry analysts say. (Ticket sales are typically split between studios and theater owners. Lacking its own distribution infrastructure, Apple is paying Warner Bros. to roll out and market the movie; the Burbank studio receives a small percentage of box-office revenues that increases with ticket sales above certain financial benchmarks.)
Further compounding the challenges of reaching positive cash flow, race-car-based movies haven’t cut broadly across culture to put butts in seats: They perform more as “dad movies” than four-quadrant crowd-pleasers. The 2019 biopic Ford v Ferrari is currently the genre’s reigning champ with a $226.2 million worldwide gross. Others, such as 2008’s ill-fated anime adaptation Speed Racer, Rush, and the video-game-based Gran Turismo (2023), either generated modest returns or flopped.
All of which would matter little to a technology giant with nearly $4 billion in yearly revenues, except for widespread industry speculation that Apple will drastically scale back its theatrical output if F1 doesn’t turn into a blockbuster: “F1 could be the last Apple TV+ theatrical release,” blared a September headline on Apple Insider. As the thinking goes, the company took a black eye with last year’s Wolfs. The Brad Pitt–George Clooney two-hander received lukewarm reviews out of the Venice Film Festival, prompting Apple to all but cancel its theatrical run. (Wolfs spent just a week in limited release before hitting Apple TV+, thereby end-running any announcement of lackluster box-office tallies.) And dismal audience response to Apple originals like the Scarlett Johansson– and Channing Tatum–starring Fly Me to the Moon (budget: $100 million; worldwide theatrical gross: $42.2 million) and espionage action-comedy Argylle (budget: $200 million, worldwide gross: $96.2 million) dampened enthusiasm in Cupertino to plow money into what Silicon Valley already perceives as a dying business. Outside of director Spike Lee’s Akira Kurosawa “reinterpretation” Highest 2 Lowest (which receives a two-week theatrical run via distribution by A24 in August), Apple has no other big movies planned for the rest of this year or 2026.
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Countervailing those crushing financial g-forces, though, F1 has some notable co-signs. It arrives co-produced by seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton (who has been heavily promoting the movie and also served as a kind of racing-realism consultant) and features cameos by a who’s who of top drivers including Dutch phenom Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc, and Sergio Perez. The film was shot at and around real Formula One Grands Prix and enjoys the full institutional backing of the sport’s governing body, FIA. The hope is F1 the movie plugs into F1 the sporting league’s global fan base, estimated to be in excess of 750 million people, and crosses over into the insular U.S. market like Netflix’s wildly successful docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive. (Industry speculation holds that when Formula One’s American TV rights deal expires at ESPN at the end of this season, Apple will step in as a contender to become its broadcast home.) Meanwhile, F1’s dad-movie bona fides are only bolstered by its main man behind the camera: Joseph Kosinski, director of the $1.5 billion–grossing, most lucrative father-friendly flick of all time, Top Gun: Maverick.
To be sure, Apple is harnessing its vast technological reach to promote the movie. It has programmed trailers for the movie to pop up every time a subscriber opens Apple TV+ and enabled iPhone push notifications for F1 that offer a $10 discount at Fandango for anyone buying two or more tickets (aggravating some users in the process). But the company’s media math remains opaque. Unlike other OTT services, Apple TV+ does not disclose its subscriber numbers nor financial returns specifically attached to streaming (which are lumped in quarterly earnings reports under a general “Services” heading that includes revenues from games, music, and the App store). In a recent interview with Variety, Apple CEO Tim Cook denied any grand strategy to leverage content creation to move hardware units. “I don’t have it in my mind that I’m going to sell more iPhones because of it,” he said of F1.
Although premium large-format screenings in Imax, 4DX, and D-Box are expected to drive substantial business this weekend, industry analysts and insiders say F1’s ultimate value proposition will likely be dictated by something other than its theatrical bottom line. “This may end up being a very expensive commercial for original content on Apple TV,” says Daniel Loria, senior vice-president of content strategy and editorial director at Boxoffice Pro. “I would say that Apple’s success metrics on any of their films are going to be tied with how they perform following their theatrical release,” i.e., once they start streaming on Apple TV+ (no streaming date has been announced yet for F1). “Not to say that theatrical performance isn’t important. But this is a streamer first.”
Albeit a streamer determined to do things its own peculiar way. Side-stepping the kind of vast content-library construction now associated with services like Amazon Prime Video or HBO Max, Apple TV+ has accumulated just a few hundred titles over its six years in existence, curated around its relatively tiny collection of original films and TV shows.
But at what dollar amount could one reasonably call F1 a victory for Apple? I posed that question to a Hollywood insider with business dealings across TV and movies, including several of Apple’s distribution partners. Citing Apple’s primary raison d’être as a streamer and its lack of financial transparency, he pointed out the company faces no external pressure to exult in box-office triumph or wallow in defeat like most studios. Outside of F1 outrightly flopping, even so-so ticket sales would likely meet the corporate mandate (to the extent one around theatrical films even exists). Profitability on a ticket-by-ticket basis is, in effect, beside the point. “I don’t think they can declare a victory. The only thing they can declare is non-embarrassment,” he says. “Because success is years down the road.”
