That’s kind of a wide-ranging title, isn’t it?
We won’t go that broad, I promise. I just want to take a look at what’s next for racing in media, thanks to some recent announcements involving Dale Earnhardt, Brad Pitt’s Formula 1 film and more.
First off, the one that happened Tuesday (May 14), where it was revealed that Amazon Prime Video is set to release an upcoming, four-part docuseries on Earnhardt. More notably, it’s a co-production between NASCAR Productions and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries. The latter organization brought us 2013’s Rush, still for my money the greatest racing film ever made.
I figure it’ll align with a lot of what we’ve seen lately in terms of multi-part sports documentaries. We saw both The Last Dance and The History of the Seattle Mariners in 2020, both phenomena in their own right — the former was a guaranteed-hit ESPN production (about a current NASCAR owner, coincidentally) that happened to take off even more because of COVID-19. The latter did the same — a six-part production from SB Nation‘s Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein about the weird history of one of MLB’s most fruitless teams, which has nearly five million views on its excellent, all-in-one Supercut edition.
I love both (the Mariners’ doc slightly more), but it feels like an evolution in long-form storytelling that’s come to fruition thanks to the rise of streaming. Sure, tight, 90-to-120-ish-minute documentaries are great, especially if they’re able to tell the story properly. But if there’s more, then by all means go longer.
It means I can’t as justifiably rank it in my year-end movie lists, but that’s just me.
Other examples within sports include SB Nation‘s follow-ups The History of the Minnesota Vikings, The History of the Atlanta Falcons and Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb; ESPN’s O.J.: Made in America and Once Upon a Time in Queens; and Ken Burns’ Baseball. As much as I like movies, it’s a step in a good direction for long-form content. Keep it to a film runtime if the content doesn’t extend beyond that, but given the generational footprint the Earnhardts have in NASCAR, it feels pretty fitting to me.
The other bit of news I want to touch on is the revelation, within the past week, that Joseph Kosinski’s F1 film — the Brad Pitt starrer — is going to have a budget of $300 million or more.
That number ranks it, roughly, in the top 15 or so most expensive films…
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