Racing games hit the mainstream last year, as pro drivers picked up their controllers (or expensive driving rigs) to fill in for the postponed motorsport season. In fact they even proved a big hit on television, drawing in viewers by the million.
Now one director is making a movie based on sim racing, and it’s set to arrive on Amazon Prime later this year. The film goes by the name of “The Sim Racer“, and filming has already wrapped, with the movie now in post-production.
The director, Brock Drury, also wrote the script for The Sim Racer, starting last July during the height of the virtual motorsport boom. Billed as a comedy/drama, the plot seems to center on a sim racer by the name of Luke Wallace — played by Roman Boylen — who needs to find almost $10,000 to prevent the bank foreclosing on his house. Wallace thus enters a sim racing event to earn the cash he needs to save his home.
How this plays out remains a mystery at this point, with almost every other detail about the 90-minute film’s script or casting. We do know that an actor by the name of Bradley Harrelson will play the role of “Shooter Jones”, though again we don’t know how he fits into the plot.
Much of the filming has taken place in Drury’s native Georgia, USA, with the majority of filming at Jekyll Island in the south-east of the State. That was also a location for X-Men: First Class, where it stood in for the Caribbean.
We’d assume that a lot of the action will be indoors, and Drury has posted the shot above showing Boylen as Wallace sitting at his sim-racing rig — which looks like a Logitech G29 mounted to a Next Level Racing Wheel Stand — on Reddit. However other filming locations around Brantley County, Georgia, have also been mentioned.
Of course it isn’t the first movie mooted with sim racing as the theme, although it does look like it’ll be the first one to be finished. We heard way back in 2013 about a potential Gran Turismo film, though as of 2018 that seemed to be dead in the water. The Sim Racer appears to have less financial clout behind it, but money doesn’t necessarily make a great movie.
According to Drury, a trailer should land for his film later this year, with plans for the final cut to land on Amazon Prime soon after.
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