With the same daredevil do-it-for-real stunts as Top Gun: Maverick (not to mention the same director at the helm), Brad Pitt’s Formula 1 movie will be the perfect replacement during the interminable wait for Top Gun 3. After the runaway blockbuster success of Top Gun: Maverick, it’s only a matter of time before Tom Cruise gets back in the cockpit to make Top Gun 3. But since he’s hard at work on the next Mission: Impossible and he’s signed on to shoot a movie in space, it could be a while before the Top Gun threequel becomes a reality.
In the meantime, Pitt’s upcoming F1 movie will scratch that itch. Pitt will play a legendary F1 driver who retired in the ‘90s after a horrific crash. The plot sees Pitt’s character being reluctantly brought out of retirement to train a promising young rookie, played by Damson Idris. Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski is in the director’s chair and it’s aiming to recapture the high-octane spectacle that made the Top Gun sequel such a hit.
When it hit theaters in 2022, Top Gun: Maverick felt like a breath of fresh air. In an age when most blockbusters create their action spectacle with soulless, weightless CGI, Top Gun: Maverick came along with dazzling aerial stunt work done for real and immortalized on film from the cockpit. Kosinski is bringing that same do-it-for-real spirit to his next movie, putting the camera inside a racing car instead of the cockpit of a fighter jet.
This untitled F1 movie is putting real actors in racing cars for the sake of creating a realistic and impressive visual spectacle. In Top Gun: Maverick, not all the actors were literally flying their planes, but they were in the cockpits of planes that were being flown for real to get an authentic, visceral response. Kosinski’s F1 movie is doing the same thing with racing cars, giving the actors (and the audience) the feeling of being right there in the characters’ shoes.
If new reports are to be believed, the budget of Pitt’s F1 movie has ballooned to more than $300 million, which would make it one of the most expensive movies ever made. That’s more expensive than most Marvel movies. The general rule of thumb is that a movie needs to make back 2.5 times its production budget to turn a profit. If these reports are accurate, then Brad Pitt’s F1 movie will need to become as big a blockbuster as Top Gun: Maverick just to get into the black.