Jerry Bruckheimer has stepped up to dismiss talk of next year’s F1 film costing $300m as being wide of the mark.
The first trailer for F1 has finally landed, even though the release of the film is still a full year away. Still, it feels like we’ve been waiting for a long time to catch a first proper glimpse of this project given that we’ve been hearing about the project since late 2021.
Like a lot of large-scale projects over the last couple of years, F1 has been subjected to some major complications including last year’s strikes and the usual round reshoots that films of this scale tend to undergo, all of which has led to speculation that the film’s budget (which is being paid for by Apple) is somewhere around the $300m mark.
Jerry Bruckheimer is a legendary producer who knows a thing or two about shepherding expensive movies through tricky phases of production and he’s popped up to flat out deny the film’s rumoured price tag.
Speaking with Deadline as part of a wider-ranging look at the production of F1, Bruckheimer states that those $300m budget estimations are some way off from the actual number, stating: “it’s completely, unfortunately, tens of millions of dollars out of whack in the wrong direction, and in the right direction for us.”
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The Top Gun: Maverick producer goes on to offer a couple of reasons why the number is lower than some have speculated, adding that “what people don’t realise is, first of all, we’re shooting in rebate [locations], England has a big rebate, lots of Europe has rebates and so does Abu Dhabi. It all lowers the budget.”
Then there’s the advertising dollars too, which could be the real golden goose for the production. The cars driven by Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in the film will be plastered in advertising as all Formula 1 cars are, and Bruckheimer claims that “we’ve raised more money for our car [through sponsorship] than some Formula 1 teams. You take that all into consideration and it really drops that number quite a bit lower than what people would think.”
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If that $300m number is accurate for the price of the negative, then rebates could give the production back around $30m. As for how much the advertising could bring in, the sky is indeed the limit. We’ve seen some astonishing ad deals over the years, not least Heineken paying a reported $45m to have 007 sipping one of its beers in 2012’s Skyfall, so who knows? Of course, that’s if the price tag for the film isn’t already north of $300m given that the original package for the project was believed to be $140m. Then there were the ballooning strike costs and the cost of reshoots too. We’ve covered that story in a little more detail right here.
Brad Pitt stars as a former driver who returns to Formula 1 in the movie, alongside Damson Idris as his teammate at the fictional APXGP team. The film arrives in June of next year.
