McDonald’s F1 Movie Cars Were a Limited 2025 Drop—The Film Now Streams
McDonald’s miniature-car campaign for F1 The Movie belongs to the film’s June 2025 theatrical launch, not to a new promotion. The limited release reached selected Latin American markets with two collectible designs, while some Brazilian restaurants added temporary racing installations.
The important update is what happened after that launch: the restaurant activation is now historical, and the Brad Pitt film has been available to stream on Apple TV since December 12, 2025. The surviving evidence also supports a more precise description of the campaign as a McDonald’s tie-in for an Apple Original Films release—not proof of a broader, continuing Apple–McDonald’s corporate partnership.
What McDonald’s actually launched in June 2025
In Brazil, the promotion began on June 25, 2025, alongside a limited-edition McMenu built around the Bacon Quarter Pounder. Customers could obtain the themed cars with the meal or purchase them separately through participating restaurant channels, including counters, self-service kiosks, drive-through service and the McDonald’s app.
Arcos Dorados’ official Brazilian release identifies two designs: one with a paint scheme inspired by McDonald’s colors and another based on APXGP, the fictional team featured in F1 The Movie. It calls the cars exclusive miniatures and describes McDonald’s as an official Formula 1 sponsor in Latin America.
That wording clarifies the commercial relationship. McDonald’s used its regional Formula 1 sponsorship and restaurants to promote the film, but the official announcement does not present Apple as the operator of the meal offer or describe a permanent alliance between the two companies. Apple’s role came through Apple Original Films, which produced and released the movie; McDonald’s supplied the consumer promotion and physical retail experience.
The 1:43 cars were aimed beyond the usual children’s meal
The campaign stood apart from a conventional Happy Meal toy release. Contemporary reporting described the two cars as 1:43-scale collectibles attached to a full-size meal, with the Brazilian offer allowing customers to add a car to the Bacon Quarter Pounder combo or buy one separately.
9to5Mac’s launch report placed the promotion in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and reported an additional Brazilian price of R$64 with the combo. It also cited just over 92,000 units for Brazil, underscoring that this was a limited inventory campaign rather than an open-ended merchandise line.
The two liveries gave the product a deliberate split identity. The APXGP version connected directly to the fictional racing team driven on screen by Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes and Damson Idris’s Joshua Pearce; the other turned McDonald’s own color scheme into an imagined racing livery. That made the cars recognizable both as movie merchandise and as branded objects in their own right.
Regional availability is equally important. Evidence for the launch covers selected Latin American countries, not a worldwide McDonald’s rollout. Listings on resale platforms may show that individual cars later travelled elsewhere, but they do not establish an official promotion in the United States, Europe or other regions.
Brazilian restaurants extended the campaign into a temporary experience
McDonald’s did more than place a collectible beside a meal in São Paulo. The Méqui 1000 restaurant on Avenida Paulista received racing-themed decoration and a Formula 1 car display, while the Henrique Schaumann location displayed a replica car and offered a racing simulator on weekends.
The simulator schedule ran from June 28 through July 20, 2025. That explicit window is useful when assessing old posts about the activation: photographs and videos can remain online long after an installation closes, but the published schedule does not support treating the experience as currently available.
The physical displays also reveal the campaign’s logic. A miniature could leave the restaurant with a customer, while the replica, simulator and decorated storefront turned selected locations into material for social posts and creator coverage. The collectible was therefore both merchandise and a compact reminder of a larger, time-limited launch event.
The film has moved from theatrical promotion to streaming
The clearest current status concerns the movie rather than the restaurant offer. Apple’s current F1 The Movie page says the film opened in theaters on June 27, 2025, and has streamed on Apple TV since December 12, 2025. It identifies Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes and Lewis Hamilton among the producers, while reporting more than $630 million in worldwide box-office revenue.
This later distribution stage changes how the miniature-car story should be read. In June 2025, the McMenu and cars helped create attention around a theatrical opening; now they document an earlier phase of a film that viewers can access through Apple’s subscription service. The cars themselves remain collectible artifacts of that launch, but none of the reviewed pages establishes a renewed McDonald’s sale or a continuing restaurant promotion in 2026.
For collectors, the distinction prevents two common misunderstandings. The cars were not announced as a permanent global McDonald’s product, and a resale listing is not evidence that a restaurant still stocks them. Their verified significance is narrower and more interesting: they were region-specific, cinema-linked objects designed to carry a fictional Formula 1 team from the screen into an everyday consumer setting.
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