Before we go anywhere with this, happy 20th anniversary of my first movie in theaters, which was NASCAR: The IMAX Experience.
I revisited it 20 years to the day that my 6-year-old self went to the theaters for the first time at the Science Museum of Virginia’s dome and it holds up! Highly recommend everyone give it a rewatch.
With all of the sequels and prequels and reboots constantly cycling in and out of theaters nowadays, I realized I hadn’t written much about racing movie franchises … and there isn’t but so much to say, because there’s only been a couple multi-movie motorsports installments.
And with last month’s blockbuster sequel tentpoles hitting theaters, from the excellent craft of Dune: Part Two to the insanely fun Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (who knew we needed to see Godzilla suplexing Kong or Kong beating up two Hollow Earth apes with a baby Hollow Earth ape?), this felt right (don’t worry, the baby Hollow Earth ape was fine). This month, we have prequels (The First Omen) and original fare (Civil War), so we moviegoers are doing damn well right now.
Racing movie franchises?
Not so much. As I’ve elaborated on before, the most common motorsports films are either direct-to-streaming or TV-aired documentaries, plus the very occasional theatrically-released film. Even then, as we saw with Blink of an Eye, Rowdy and Rookie Season in the past five years or so, they’re severely limited in engagement. At least the first two, I believe, were one-night-only Fathom Events showcases. Rookie Season was a really random release in March 2022 and played for like a week, about a far less widely-reaching subject. Go figure.
Either way, let’s roll our way through a quick overview of what franchises do exist. And there’s, like, two. One, if you’re really a stickler for the same cast.
The One Racing Movie Franchise to Rule Them All: Cars
Unfortunately (or fortunately, or in between, or a bit of all three), our lone, true, franchise-by-definition example is Cars. Owen Wilson holding back on the “wow” bits as he voices Lightning McQueen through three movies, multiple countries and a trio of films in varying quality.
The first Cars is great! I saw it in…
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