‘F1’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Van Lathan

December 23, 2025·1 hr 46 min·8 clips

Bill Simmons calls 'F1' the most unbelievable success story of the 2020s, despite its chaotic production and Brad Pitt's age.

Apple needed a win. The panel frames F1 as more than a glossy racing movie, since its $200 million budget and roughly $630 million haul make it feel like a studio-defining bet that actually paid off. That changes the Apple story. Before this, Apple movies come off as expensive, unconstrained swings, with Napoleon held up as the messy counterexample. Then F1 becomes the turn. The hosts sound genuinely struck by the care on screen, especially next to streamer movies that spend big without looking shaped. The director gets a bump, too. One speaker says this is the movie that makes him the big-budget action guy, a clean status jump after the Mad World and Gears of War commercial detour. And yes, the detour matters. The show turns an old commercial memory into a mini category fight, then snaps back to scale, polish, and studio credibility. Apple TV becomes part of the joke. They say the movie is basically staring at you whenever you open the service, which only makes F1 feel more like Apple's flagship film. The business talk keeps widening. The conversation links the movie's success to Apple landing actual F1 rights, so the whole thing starts to feel less like one hit and more like a reset. It stays loose, though. The cold open drifts through Ringer show banter and a half-remembered Oz reference before the movie talk really settles in. The closing beat turns inward. Asked which 2025 Rewatchables they liked best, the room starts tossing out High Fidelity, Jaws 2, Halloween 2, and Diary 3 like friends fighting over a shared calendar. Halloween 2 gets extra love. The fun is not only the ranking, but the little memory chain around it: the car hit, the wildness, the category that got missed. That is the texture here. F1 gives them the thesis, but the pleasure is hearing the panel chase every side road and still find the main lap again.

As heard by us

A loose, sharp Rewatchables on F1 as Apple’s big-screen credibility play.

The Rewatchables treats F1 as more than a glossy Brad Pitt vehicle, framing it as a referendum on Apple’s movie ambitions. Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Van Lathan are most locked in when they argue that the film gave Apple a kind of blockbuster credibility it had been chasing:…

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Chris Ryan and the Rewatchables crew debate whether a $630 million racing movie actually earned every dollar.

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