Jurassic World Rebirth was the box office winner for the long holiday weekend here in America. Americans still love dinosaur stories, and the rest of the world does as well. JWR ended up making over $318 million worldwide in its five-day opening. That’s more than F1 has made in two weeks – F1’s two-week box office haul is now $293,617,106 (per Box Office Mojo). Which is perfectly respectable, except that I’m quite sure that Apple spent over $300 million to make this fakakta movie and they probably spent tens of millions to promote it and hype it. Still, F1 is now Apple’s highest-grossing movie, and obviously, there’s already talk about making Vroom Vroom Part II.
One of the most disappointing parts of this whole F1 saga is that Pitt was once again “allowed” to promote a major film in his squirrelly, stage-managed way, which is what he’s been doing for the past nine years. Instead of constantly having “the conversation” about Pitt’s violence and his abuse of Angelina Jolie and their children, Pitt was “allowed” to speak in vague generalities about “moving on” and needing the wake-up call to dry out. More than a week after F1 came out, Vulture finally published the only piece I’ve seen which calls out Pitt’s BS. Some highlights from Vulture’s “Brad Pitt Is Fooling You.”
Pitt’s careful choreography: Pitt’s carefully choreographed press tour for F1: The Movie says otherwise. Continuing to work with crisis-management publicist Matthew Hiltzik, who has represented Johnny Depp (and whose protéges went on to represent Justin Baldoni and work in Trump’s White House), Pitt has made a concerted effort to reestablish himself as an emblem of unaffected, undiluted movie-star cool with just a hint of vulnerability. Yes, he’s struggled with alcoholism, but he’s overcome it. His new 30-something girlfriend, Ines de Ramon, has been positioned as breezy and agreeable, unlike his ex he wants you to forget…The cumulative effect of F1 and its press tour have been a carefully tuned charm offensive meant to obscure, if not outright bury, the alleged violent particulars of his behavior toward ex-wife Angelina Jolie. Pitt has been so successful at this rehabilitation that most of the public don’t even understand what he’s trying to rehabilitate himself for.
The reminder: If you need a reminder: Court documents allege that, during a trip on their private plane in 2016, Pitt threw Jolie against a wall, shook her, and poured alcohol on her while she was trying to sleep. When their children tried to defend Jolie, Pitt “physically abused one of their children.” Five days after the flight, Jolie would file for divorce (it was only finalized in December 2024). In the years since, Pitt won an Oscar for Best Supporting actor in 2020 for his role in Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. His movies after that, Bullet Train (2022) and Wolfs (2024), didn’t light the world on fire. His Bullet Train press tour was marked by an awkward interaction with Bad Bunny, in which the Puerto Rican star looked unimpressed by Pitt’s attempts to embody the chill pinnacle of Hollywood stardom. Wolfs reteamed Pitt with his Oceans franchise co-star George Clooney, another evocation of past glory, but the film was a critical and financial flop. No one on either press tour asked Pitt a single question about Jolie.
Absolutely no one asked Pitt about Jolie or their kids: In his latest glossy, GQ profile, Pitt gives an appearance of unmediated candor, even though he isn’t asked about Jolie or about his estrangement from his six children, some of whom are reportedly legally stripping his name from theirs.
The illusion of Brad Pitt: When an actor ties their rehabilitation to their blockbuster film, it becomes difficult to extricate the art from the artist. The onscreen performance feeds the off-screen persona. The off-screen persona is a performance, too, one that sells ideals and sometimes cashmere sweaters or cell-phone plans. Pitt has always sold a particular vision of American white masculinity, one predicated on charisma, unflappability, and seamless confidence. His deftness in removing the specter of violence from his own narrative is a reminder of the ways violence against women is normalized. It isn’t that people don’t believe in what happened to Jolie on that plane — they just don’t care.
“It isn’t that people don’t believe in what happened to Jolie on that plane — they just don’t care.” Exactly. I was so disappointed to see women on social media talking breezily about how “F1 is a good movie” and “wow, Brad Pitt is still a movie star.” These weren’t bots, they were actual journalists and critics and regular people who completely side-stepped Pitt’s violent past and all of the crazy sh-t he’s done to Angelina in the past nine years. I sometimes wonder if I’m one of the few people who is no longer buying anything Pitt is selling, but it’s now a quietly growing conversation that… Brad Pitt no longer has any rizz.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
