F1 The Movie (2025) on Netflix
PG-1320252h 35mActionDramaSport
Sonny Hayes left Formula One after a crash and has raced wherever he could since. His former teammate Rubén Cervantes asks him to drive for APXGP alongside rookie Joshua Pearce.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.6/10392,611 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
Sonny Hayes was a Formula One prodigy until a crash at the 1993 Spanish Grand Prix ended his time in the series. For thirty years afterward he has driven wherever he can find a seat. When he wins the 24 Hours of Daytona, his former teammate Rubén Cervantes approaches him: APXGP, the Formula One team Rubén owns, is struggling, and he wants Sonny as its second driver. Unless APXGP takes one of the nine Grands Prix remaining that season, its investors will sell. Sonny agrees. At the team he meets Kate McKenna, the technical director, and Joshua Pearce, a rookie who fears the team's troubles will damage his own career. Sonny finds the modern cars hard to handle and proposes aerodynamic changes to make up for APXGP's lack of speed.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about F1 The Movie (2025)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- F1 was shot at real Grand Prix weekends: at Silverstone in July 2023 the fictional APXGP team had its own garage and motorhome, Brad Pitt sat in on the drivers' briefing, and the team's two cars were put at the back of the grid with stunt drivers handling part of the formation lap.
- Pitt and Idris tested Formula Three and Formula Two cars before filming, and the F2 Dallara used on screen was stretched, widened and given a Formula One aerodynamic package by Mercedes Applied Science and run by Carlin Motorsport. Six visually identical chassis were built, one of them electric to stop it overheating in the pit lane, plus six remote-controlled ones for crashes.
- Apple designed a custom onboard camera for the cars based on the iPhone and powered by its A-series system on a chip; with help from Sony the rigs were shrunk to about a quarter of the size of those made for Top Gun: Maverick, letting up to four cameras sit on a car at once.
- The SAG-AFTRA strike began the week after filming started at the British Grand Prix, leaving the lead actors unavailable and sending a reduced crew of only Equity actors to races; filming then continued through the season to make up for the lost races.
- The camera-mounted Lola B2K/10 used for high-speed filming could not keep up with the modified F2 cars; by the time shooting moved to Hungary it had lost oil pressure and suffered a pump failure, so it was scrapped and replaced with one of the GP3-engined APXGP cars.
- Hans Zimmer wrote a hybrid score of orchestra and electronics, treating the orchestra as "the human that sits inside the machine" and the synths as the machine; discussions with producer and Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton shaped how the music was written.
- F1 became the highest-grossing film of Brad Pitt's career, overtaking the $540 million theatrical run of World War Z (2013).
- Damson Idris was hired in April 2023 after a lengthy casting process that had included a January 2023 shortlist of actors driving the car.
