The official title of the upcoming Brad Pitt-led Formula 1 movie - F1 - is something that lends itself quite easily to jibes about a lack of imagination.
But it is so clearly not, and ahead of its 2025 release, F1 being chosen as the name actively heightens both the risk and the reward of grand prix racing's unprecedented pop cultural undertaking.
Movies don't really sink or swim on the strength of titles alone, although, if you were to hear it from, for example, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, the name The Shawshank Redemption was a major factor in the now-acclaimed and universally beloved 1994 release initially stumbling badly at the box office.
Calling the F1 movie F1 will not cause it to bomb. From a purely financial standpoint, it feels almost guaranteed to help the movie's bottom line: a short, sharp, memorable title that causes no confusion and instantly identifies the movie with what it's about and who's backing it.
But that's also very much part of the gamble here. Calling it F1 raises the stakes.
Rush is an F1 movie. John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, using real F1 racing footage and featuring all sorts of other authentic aspects of motorsport, is an F1 movie. This new one is intended to be the F1 movie. Its logo is the logo of Formula 1, its name is the name of Formula 1.
They could have called it Apex, or Lights Out, or Overtake: The F1 Story, or anything like that, and instead F1, which is notoriously protective about its image rights and name, has allowed it to link directly, unambiguously, to the championship.
In doing so, it will maximise the reach it can have. If you're looking for new audiences, in an effort to repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle effect of Drive to Survive, this is the right way to go about it. It perhaps risks making it more marketing material than art - the kind of accusation that can be not unreasonably levied at, say, Greta Gerwig's pop cultural behemoth Barbie - but that's not an accusation that will keep F1 figures awake at night.
But that direct link between movie and championship, between the film product and the sporting product, is only worth anything if it's good and successful. If it's not, then what would've otherwise been just a run-of-the-mill marketing misfire becomes a genuine source of embarrassment.
The good signs
Director Joseph Kosinski is three for five in terms of delivering massive box office successes from his feature-length projects.
Sci-fi fare Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, while met with a general shrug from critics, both did well at the box office. Top Gun: Maverick absolutely raked it in - but was also a massive crowd-pleaser and as big of a critical darling as that kind of movie ever gets, which was reflected in an honest-to-goodness Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.
On the flipside, firefighter drama Only the Brave bombed at the box office - despite being Kosinski's most cohesive work before Maverick - and the Netflix-distributed Spiderhead didn't exactly make a massive pop cultural splash. This column is very likely the first you hear of it, despite the fact it stars Thor's Chris Hemsworth.
But three out of five isn't bad, and even Kosinski's more uneven work has consistently shown off a flair for the visual.
F1 will want its movie to look as good as possible, emphasising the visual spectacle of the sport - after all, that's why you allow all that race weekend filming. And Kosinski movies - all five of them made in cooperation with Oscar-nominated (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Oscar-winning (Life of Pi) cinematographer Claudio Miranda - are consistently visually compelling.
F1 fans have got their fair share of laughs out of the live filming that's gone on at grand prix weekends and the various production elements ending up on full display of the public as a consequence, but the flipside of that is that we have basically total confidence that the actual racing part of the movie will look fantastic.
A first look at Brad Pitt’s #F1 movie… ‘F1’
Early thoughts?