An underdog sports story based on the life of a real gamer-turned-racecar driver, "Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story" will have sneak preview screenings at regular run admission prices in cinemas nationwide on Monday, August 21, and Tuesday, August 22. Be among the first to catch the film – watch it a week before it begins its regular run on August 30.
The film, which tells the story of Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional racecar driver, stars David Harbour, Orlando Bloom, Archie Madekwe as Mardenborough, Darren Barnet, Geri Halliwell Horner, and Djimon Hounsou.
Early fan screenings in the U.S. have led to tremendously positive responses from moviegoers, with many saying how surprised they were to love the film so much (even those who are not into the games or racing), and with many applauding the high-octane theatrical experience, imploring friends to see the movie on the big screen in a packed theater.
“#GranTurismoMovie was absolutely fantastic! The whole theater screamed and cheered the whole film,” raved fan Darrell Fair on Twitter/X.
Posted Cristy Velasquez, "Just finished watching Gran Turismo and OMG it was AMAZING!! I was at the edge of my seat. I will definitely be watching this again.”
Grant Skoog lauded almost every aspect of the film in his post: “Blomkamp’s #GranTurismo is inspirational, emotional, thrilling, and riveting. Incredible action! Phenomenal acting. The moving score, fast-paced editing, and gorgeous cinematography, made this one of the best theater experiences. I was on the edge of my seat. 9/10 #GranTurismoMovie.”
Some critics were also impressed with the film. Said Variety, “‘Gran Turismo,’ Blomkamp’s first major feature in eight years, is easily his best. It’s made with a spontaneous humanistic grace, and the racing sequences, which dominate the movie because they’re truly the story it’s telling, are dazzlingly directed and edited.”
Indiewire raves that the film “is a thrilling retelling of one of the craziest stories in recent sports history, shot with the level of skillful spectacle that the source material demands. Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade.”
ComingSoon.net is all praises as well, describing it as “the heart-pounding crowd-pleaser of the year with [a] classic underdog story that knocks it out of the park.”
Based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough, the film is the ultimate wish fulfillment tale of a teenage Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional racecar driver.
“Gran Turismo has all the qualities of a great underdog sports story,” says producer Doug Belgrad.
Director Neill Blomkamp, whose credits include "District 9" and "Elysium", says that Jann makes a compelling character because his real-life story is an unbelievable series of dreams coming true. Like a lot of young adults, Jann seems more interested in playing videogames than with making something of his life, until he’s given a chance to play for real.
“Jann is playing ‘Gran Turismo’ in his parents’ house when all of a sudden – after years – he sees the option for GT Academy,” Blomkamp explains. “Only then did he learn how to drive proper cars – how to hit an apex and exit a corner – everything he’d done intuitively inside the game, but had never been taught.”
Blomkamp’s way into the film was through a longtime love of cars — the merging of mechanics, engineering, art, and design —and that meant the exciting possibility of showing what these cars can do.
“With a movie like this, sometimes the temptation is to go all-digital. Shoot some background plates, do digital cars, drop your actors in from a virtual production environment. But in this case, everything is real, and I mean literally everything is real. When we portray an actor driving the car, they are actually going around the track pretty close to the speed that they should be going.”
Part of doing it for real was getting the real cars and shooting on the real tracks, including the Slovakia Ring in Slovakia, the Dubai Autodrome, the Nurburgring, the Red Bull Ring in Austria, and the Hungaroring; this latter track doubles for both the GT Academy (loosely based on Silverstone, the home of UK auto racing) and Le Mans.
And in the driver’s seat, Blomkamp had one other secret weapon in showing what it was like for Mardenborough behind the wheel – and that was Jann Mardenborough himself, who served as the film’s stunt driver for the character of Jann.
“The story is based on him, Archie Madekwe portrays him, and he’s the stunt driver who drives Archie’s car as the character based on him,” says Blomkamp. “It’s amazing – some very interesting meta thing happening there.”
“It’s so surreal,” says Mardenborough. “The last time I was in Hungary, the track was packed with trucks for a race. This time, it was packed with trucks for a film being made about me. That blew my mind.”