In cinemas now, F1 The Movie is filled with familiar logos. But as studios look for ways to bankroll their films, corporate deals could be the new normal.
If Formula One used recruitment officers to find its drivers, you can bet they’d be canvassing at screenings of F1.
The sport’s governing body may not need the same volume of recruits as the US Navy. But just as 1986’s Top Gun made headlines with its close ties to America’s armed forces, Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick follow-up feels just as embedded with Formula One’s corporate arm. Created with financial backing from all ten of the sport’s teams, there’s scarcely a shot without some sort of brand collaboration hovering in the rearview mirror (quite what Expensify paid to be Pitt’s fictional team’s main sponsor is anyone’s guess – my money’s on “lots”).
Just like Top Gun, though, it’s hard to imagine the film being made any other way. Getting unauthorised access to a Mercedes-AMG makes borrowing a fighter jet look like a cycling proficiency test; where the US military has had its hand in blockbuster filmmaking for decades, F1 marks the first time the FIA has worked so closely on a major motion picture in its 121-year history. There’s a reason more recent racing hits Ford V Ferrari and Rush have been period pieces more-or-less completely devolved from the sport in its modern form.
Nonetheless, F1 can’t help but result in a bit of whiplash, especially for an audience less familiar with the source material. With logos for (deep breath) Tommy Hilfiger, Rolex, Qatar and Etihad Airways, EA Sports, Heineken, SharkNinja, Panasonic and Expensify plastered over IMAX-sized screens before we even take existing F1 teams’ sponsors into account, it’s hard to shake the feeling the whole film was designed as marketing exercise first, entertainment second.
If it’s an uncomfortable feeling, though, then it might be one cinema audiences have to get used to. Last year’s Wicked made headlines with an all-encompassing marketing campaign involving more than 400 separate brand partnerships. In an increasingly fractured media ecosystem, the less romantic side of blockbuster filmmaking is working overtime to ensure these $200m investments can get funding (and eyeballs) from as many different sources as possible. We’ve come a long way from making a Happy Meal and calling it a day (Wicked also had its own Happy Meal).
Read more: F1 The Movie review | Fast, furious, and lots of product placement
Meanwhile, Apple Studios has been taking steps to build bridges with its $3.7tn parent company. F1 joins Stormzy short Big Man and The Weeknd’s Dancing In The Flames in the production house’s growing list of film projects shot on the whole or in part with iPhone cameras (according to Apple’s WWDC showcase, modified iPhone parts were used to replace Formula One’s usual in-car set-up). Not to mention the tech’s much-publicised use in Sony’s 28 Years Later to replicate the 2002 prequel’s camcorder aesthetic.
The move hints at a more cohesive brand strategy at the heart of the world’s biggest company – one which uses a state-of-the-art production house and deals with legacy studios as showcases for its latest consumer tech. In F1’s case, it’s also another brand partnership (albeit an internal one) in a film hardly short of them.
With blockbusters themselves coming under plenty of scrutiny over their ballooning budgets (F1 at one stage was rumoured to cost as much as $300m, a figure director Joseph Kosinski has described as a load of tosh), increasing corporatisation is one method studios seem to be using to justify certain films’ massive price tags. For Apple, which has previously justified its spending on projects like Martin Scorsese’s $200m Killers Of The Flower Moon and Matthew Vaughn’s Argyle as loss-leaders to increase the profile of Apple TV+, F1 has already provided the kind of visibility for both its studio and electronics brands to almost look like an unusually expensive ad campaign.
Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen Hollywood’s place in popular culture recede ever faster into obscurity, meaning fewer original blockbusters are able to eke out a profit. Now studios aren’t just looking at a film’s potential to sell tickets – but to pay for itself in other ways as well. If product placement, brand partnerships and the like can offset some of the costs associated with strapping Brad Pitt to a Mercedes or Cynthia Erivo to a broomstick, will they soon be the price we have to pay for original(ish) movies? Can storytelling really thrive when a film’s creatives are beholden to an increasingly vast and varied number of stakeholders? Could F1 have given us a stinging rebuke of Formula One’s absurd corporatisation with so many of the sport’s biggest names throwing cash at the production?
The task of getting a four-quadrant blockbuster to market has always been a delicate balancing act between corporate wizardry and art. There’s a sense it might now be leaning in a certain direction – and probably not the one you’d like…
