F1: The Movie has been a mᴀssive success both critically and commercially, pulling in over $350 million across the world. The film is the most recent outing from acclaimed director Joseph Kosinski, whose previous hit feature was the Best Picture-nominated Top Gun: Maverick. Now that F1 could also receive a Best Picture nomination, the director is receiving huge amounts of praise.

This has understandably led many to compare F1 to Top Gun: Maverick — but there’s actually another project that more closely resembles the high-octane storytelling of F1. Both Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are among the most popular and highest-earning actors of their generation, and their respective collaborations with Kosinski are reminiscent of another sports drama from the early ’90s.

F1 The Movie Gives Brad Pitt His Days Of Thunder

F1’s Comparisons To Tony Scott’s Sports Drama Are Well-Deserved

The comparisons may be primarily between F1 and Top Gun: Maverick, but the more accurate correlation for Pitt’s new action movie is with Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder. Released in 1990, Days of Thunder follows Tom Cruise’s lead, a professional racing driver who strikes up a friendship with his compeтιтor and later enters a heated rivalry with a newcomer on the track.

The movie has plenty of thematic similarities to F1, from the cost of ambition to the bonding nature of sports. Kosinski’s fierce, dynamic action scenes in F1 are also very reminiscent of the way Scott filmed Days of Thunder, with plenty of exciting practical effects and on-location set pieces. This, in turn, has sparked many comparisons between Scott and Kosinski as filmmakers.

These parallels are further strengthened by the fact that Scott was the director of the original Top Gun, before Kosinski came along to direct the sequel. There are clearly plenty of similarities between these directors, which will likely only become more evident when Kosinski returns with Top Gun 3 in a few years.

However, it’s Brad Pitt who’s the star of the show in F1, and the movie gives him plenty of scene-stealing moments that are very reminiscent of Cruise’s performance in Days of Thunder. The pair previously crossed paths on 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, but Cruise and Pitt surprisingly haven’t worked together since then, despite their careers following very similar high-profile trajectories.

Both Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are well-known as actors who can adapt swiftly to any genre, from studio comedies to action blockbusters, but F1 is a lot more high-octane than anything Pitt has done before. In the same way that Days of Thunder helped introduce Cruise to the sports/action genre, F1 is achieving a similar feat for Pitt — further proving just how similar these two projects are.