While fans of both motor racing and of motion pictures are not altogether uncommon, movies about motor racing are not exactly famous for setting the box-office on fire. Some high-profile movies about motor racing that Hollywood has made in the last fifty or sixty years include John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), Lee Katzin's Le Mans (1971), Tony Scott's Days of Thunder (1990), Renny Harlin's Driven (2001), Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), John Lasseter's Cars (2006) and the Wachowski's Speed Racer (2008). There are several other films about car racing, but seeings as how they mostly deal with underground street racing (e.g. The Fast and Furious movies) rather than the sanctioned kind that takes place on racetracks I don't think these are quite the same.
Now, of the movies listed, the last two non-Nascar-themed films, Speed Racer and Driven, were somewhat infamous box-office failures. The recent documentary based on the life and death of the late F1 racer Ayrton Senna, titled, appropriately enough Senna, made a splash among film critics and earned reasonably respectable numbers for a documentary, but again nothing that would send suits rushing to make movies about motor racing in general or F1 racing in particular. The closest grand prix racing has gotten to global box-office success, in fact, is the brief Monaco race scene in Iron Man 2.
My hat goes off, therefore, to veteran filmmaker Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon, The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and a whole lot more) for daring to make the upcoming film Rush, the first full-on, dramatization of Formula One movie since Grand Prix. (For those who want to quibble this point, Driven was set in the now-defunct Champ Car racing series, which has since been folded into the US-based Indycar series, so it doesn't count).
Rush is the dramatization of the 1976 F1 season which was contested mainly by English playboy James Hunt of the McLaren team, played by Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari, played by Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds). The film is unique in that unlike Senna, it is a dramatization rather than a documentary, and unlike Grand Prix, it is based on an actual story rather than a fictional one.
This film has been in the pipeline for a while, so this is hardly breaking news, but one aspect of the ongoing production that I find discouraging, and which in fact spurred me to write, is how low-key everything seems to be right now. No one has bothered to throw together a Wikipedia page for the film, and announcements regarding production seem few and far between, though a month or two ago, Howard and his crew were pretty generous with shots of the sets, the cars to be used, and a few initial shots of Hemsworth in character. For racing geeks like me these little tantalizing tidbits only added to my agony considering that the film is at least a year away from commercial release, possibly even further away if they decide to release it in time for awards season, which would mean that those anxious to see this film as I am would be looking at a December 2013 release date.
Frustratingly enough, a tentpole movie based on a popular novel or comic book would, at this stage of principal photography, especially if directed by someone with Howard's profile, almost certainly have slavish coverage by media and fandom alike, and while I recognize that F1 fans and pop culture geeks are two entirely different species of enthusiast (although they can be equally opinionated and obnoxious on internet forums) I was at least hoping for some kind of waves among the fan community. Again, a Wikipedia page would be nice.
Howard himself has described Rush as an "independent" movie, and I'm not really sure what that means, but it seems to suggest that even though this movie will bear the popular Imagine films banner shared by Howard and his longtime co-producer Brian Grazer, it will be without much of the fanfare of his more heralded studio work. I certainly hope I'm wrong because right now the silence is deafening.
The worst part of this apparent lack of publicity is that as an action director who showed his chops in Apollo 13 and the firefighter action-thriller Backdraft, Howard is entirely capable of giving audiences the balls-to-the-wall action that any truly respectable movie about Formula One deserves, and therefore this movie should definitely be sold as an action film rather than as some art house drama.
The good news, though, is that with a pretty hot property in Hemsworth who, after the breakout success of Thor is lighting up the screen again in a month's time with Joss Whedon's The Avengers, the makers of Rush now have a solid selling point that they can use to get fannies in the seats. Working Title films is months away from having to market this movie but with any luck they'll make sure to capitalize on this when the time comes.
As a fan of motor racing and movies I would love to see Rush succeed and while I realize this movie has plenty of time to start generating buzz between now and its projected release date, part of me would like to at least see some effort to let the public at large know that this movie is being made and that production is coming along rather briskly. If this movie is as good as I hope it will be, I sincerely hope American audiences can get over their aversion to non-NASCAR racing movies and see it, and that global audiences, the kind that have made Formula One the world's most watched sport, can get in line at the cinemas as well.
Maybe auto racing just needs an extraordinary film in order to find a proper audience, and maybe Howard and his crew are the ones who can deliver.
