Nearly fifteen months after it first roared into theaters, F1 remains the rare summer tentpole that refuses to coast on its opening weekend and fade quietly into the streaming void. Joseph Kosinski's racing epic, released June 25, 2025, has settled into that enviable second life - the one where a movie stops being a release date and starts being a fixture. With a TMDb rating holding steady at 7.8/10 and a 156-minute runtime that somehow feels like a sprint rather than a marathon, this is the kind of Hollywood product that reminds you why the industry still bets big on movie stars and real race cars.
The premise is deceptively simple, and the film knows it. Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a racing legend who walked away from the sport years ago and has been perfectly content to stay gone. Enter Javier Bardem's Ruben Cervantes, a team principal with a struggling Formula 1 outfit and a persuasive streak a mile wide. Ruben coaxes Sonny out of retirement for one last ride - and, because no sports drama worth its salt lets its hero off that easy, hands him a second job: mentoring Joshua Pearce, a young hotshot driver played with combustible energy by Damson Idris.
What follows is a two-and-a-half-hour study in contrasts. Sonny is weathered, deliberate, a man who has made peace with his limitations and learned to work around them. Joshua is all instinct and impatience, the kind of talent that hasn't yet been taught what it costs to lose. Their dynamic gives the film its engine, and Kosinski - no stranger to putting audiences inside machines built for speed - wisely keeps the camera close enough that you feel every gearshift and every swallowed insult.
The supporting cast does the kind of unglamorous, load-bearing work that awards seasons tend to overlook. Kerry Condon's Kate McKenna brings a sharp, lived-in pragmatism to the pit wall. Tobias Menzies, as Peter Banning, and Kim Bodnia, as Kaspar Smolinski, sketch in the politics and pressure that make Formula 1 as much a boardroom sport as a track sport. Sarah Niles and Will Merrick round out a roster that never feels like filler. Everyone here has a job to do, and nobody is just standing around waiting for Pitt to walk into frame - though when he does, the movie knows exactly what it has.
And what it has, more than anything, is restraint. For a film with "Action" stamped on the genre label, F1 is surprisingly patient. Kosinski lets conversations breathe. He lets silences sit. The racing sequences, when they arrive, land harder because we've spent real time with the people strapped into those cockpits. There's no wall-to-wall cutting, no desperation to keep the audience from getting bored. The movie trusts its performers, and the performers reward that trust.
It helps that Pitt is doing some of his most relaxed work in years. Sonny Hayes could have been a greatest-hits collection of grizzled-mentor tics - the squint, the weary sigh, the grudging respect. Instead, Pitt plays him as a man genuinely unsure whether he belongs anywhere anymore, which makes his eventual recommitment feel earned rather than foreordained. Idris matches him beat for beat, never letting Joshua become merely a plot device in Sonny's redemption arc. The kid has his own arc, and Idris makes sure we feel it.
Fifteen months on, the film's persistence makes a certain kind of sense. It arrived in a summer crowded with spectacle and refused to be forgotten, and it has since become the sort of title people recommend to friends with the caveat that yes, it's long, but no, you won't notice. That's a durable compliment. Kosinski has now made a career out of big-canvas storytelling that treats craftsmanship as a form of respect for the audience, and F1 sits comfortably alongside his best work.
Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. It's a little too comfortable in its own rhythms for that, and some of the third-act beats arrive exactly where you expect them. But it's the rare piece of Hollywood machinery that runs clean - no sputtering, no cheap shortcuts, no cynicism under the hood. In a landscape increasingly defined by content that exists only to be consumed and discarded, F1 still feels like something built to last. And with a 7.8 rating that has barely budged since release, audiences seem to agree.
So here's the real question, the one Hollywood should be asking as it mines release calendars for anything with a built-in audience: what exactly did F1 get right that so many of its peers got wrong? The answer isn't complicated. It gave a legendary actor a role worthy of him, surrounded him with a cast that could push back, and let a director who understands momentum tell a story at its own speed. That shouldn't be a radical formula. Somehow, in 2026, it still is.
