Gran Turismo’s Priority on PS5 Product Placement Ruins the Movie

If you listen to the man himself, Jann Mardenborough’s journey from his bedroom to behind the wheel of a real racing car began with a dusty PlayStation 3 and a copy of Gran Turismo 5, an old Fanatec Porsche 911 wheel, a homemade racing rig made out of fibreboard, and a modest-looking monitor perched on the edge of a set of drawers. This was Mardenborough’s set up before the 19-year-old Welshman went on to beat 90,000 other entrants from 10 European countries to win the third GT Academy in 2011 – a contest first established in 2008 and designed to take the very best Gran Turismo players and turn them into real racing drivers.

This is where it all started for Jann, with a Fanatec Porsche 911 Turbo S! Will you start your journey with the Fanatec Gran Turismo DD Pro? @Jannthaman #linkinbio #GranTurismoMovie pic.twitter.com/g1sOY6IOOQ

— Fanatec (@fanatec) August 23, 2023

Unfortunately, Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo is more concerned with being an advertisement than it is telling a truthful story. I guess the quaint and frankly entirely relatable bedroom setup that helped a motorsports-obsessed teen reach an essentially unattainable dream wasn’t going to sell PlayStation 5s for Sony, so Mardenborough’s achievements were removed from the past and plopped into the present day. Movie Mardenborough now spends all his free time on his PS5, behind his brand-new Fanatec wheel, pounding the pavement in Gran Turismo 7 – available now from all good video game retailers! Reportedly, Mardenborough’s actual old racing seat does get a cameo in the movie, but I guess that makes sense: it’s the only product Sony doesn’t sell (and thus hasn’t made a new one of).

It’s not a trivial change; it’s a wholly cynical one. It starts the story on the wrong foot and instantly illustrates that authenticity is of no importance if it gets in the way of a strong product placement opportunity. The movie gains absolutely nothing from being transplanted into the present.

Worse, it actually loses plenty.

Mild spoilers for Gran Turismo follow.

By setting the movie somewhere in the narrow window between Gran Turismo 7’s March 2022 release and now, one of the biggest problems with Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo is that it’s basically forced to completely ignore over a decade of Gran Turismo Academy history. By wanting to simultaneously frame the GT Academy as a radical and unprecedented idea at the same time as showcasing the shiny new PS5, the Gran Turismo movie paints itself into an impossible corner.

Make no mistake: Mardenborough’s extraordinary, unlikely, and genuinely fascinating transition from GT gamer to professional racing car driver is a true story. What the movie omits, however, is that Mardenborough was not the first to achieve this leap.

That honour belongs to Spaniard Lucas Ordóñez, the first-ever winner of Sony’s GT Academy back in 2008. Ordóñez, an MBA student whose racing experience was gleaned entirely from Gran Turismo, secured a podium finish in his first-ever professional event and came second in the real-world GT4 Championship in his debut season.

The climax of Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo makes Mardenborough’s third-in-class finish at Le Mans the proof the traditional motorsport community needed to realise that a gamer could have what it takes to achieve great things on track, and yet it does so by completely ignoring the fact Ordóñez had already done that. Ordóñez came second-in-class at Le Mans in 2011, before Mardenborough had won his own GT Academy and was still fresh out of his bedroom. In fact, Ordóñez was even Mardenborough’s co-driver in 2013 for the third-in-class finish the movie imperfectly depicts. Yet Ordóñez isn’t actually acknowledged in the film; Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo simply deletes him from existence. It’s a baffling case of creative liberty that I can’t imagine Mardenborough would’ve really wanted. It’s especially curious considering that when the first details of the Gran Turismo movie began to surface a decade ago, GT series creator Kazunori Yamauchi initially confirmed it was going to be based on Ordóñez’s story.

Unfortunately, the problems with the Gran Turismo movie don’t begin and end with its contrived commitment to modern product placement.

Its brand of racing is a bizarre hodgepodge of artificial drama and outright fantasy. Every crucial finish is earned by a bumper in a drag race on the final straight. Overtaking everybody on the outside is faster than the inside. After clawing his way up to fourth in his very first event, Mardenborough is deliberately punted off track on the final lap by the film’s token villain. His reward? He’s mercilessly mocked by pit crew upon his return, and everyone bizarrely ignores the fact he’d raced incredibly well against experienced professionals until he was fouled in an incident that would’ve seen the other driver face stiff consequences. It’s just not believable.

It fluctuates between moments of intense reverence for the Gran Turismo series itself, to absurd sequences like an anti-climactic police chase in the Mardenborough family’s clapped-out VW Corrado that splashes the GT video game HUD on screen with popping text that exclaims “COP AVOIDANCE”. I don’t know what games the film’s creators were playing in advance of this movie, but I wonder if any of them were actually Gran Turismo with scenes like this. It probably ought to be noted that the VW Corrado has never actually even appeared in a Gran Turismo game at the time of writing, and it isn’t here in the movie because the Mardenboroughs owned a Corrado VR6 – Jann Mardenborough has clarified in interviews that the VW was Blomkamp’s choice. But why not make the car a late ’90s Mazda Demio, in that case? The very first car in Gran Turismo 1’s first license test, and the reward for finishing your first Sunday Cup? Gran Turismo players would notice that, I promise.

That said, considering there isn’t even a single song from the original GT games in the movie, it’s probably little surprise that real opportunities for clever Easter eggs like that have been lost.

Still, I just keep circling back around to the simple fact that the Gran Turismo movie has blown up the timeline of Jann Mardenborough’s life, and the successes of the GT Academy, seemingly in order to get a PS5 on cinema screens. No glimpse of an eight-year-old Mardenborough discovering the original Gran Turismo on PlayStation 1 at a friend’s house back in the late ’90s, because movie Mardenborough hasn’t even been born yet. No acknowledgement of previous GT Academy winners who have achieved impressive feats on track over the past decade-and-change; only the power of PS5 can turn gamers into racers!

Maybe I’m just being pigheaded, but this kind of stuff just sticks in my craw. Messing with established things for purely commercial purposes, that is.

Here’s a deep cut. Way back in early 2008 I recall sitting in on a presentation for High Moon Studios’ The Bourne Conspiracy, which was a passable enough third-person action game that carried author Robert Ludlum’s name on the box but was primarily informed by the first film in the series: 2002’s The Bourne Identity.

There were just two key things High Moon weren’t able to nab from the movies. One was the likeness of Mr. Matt Damon himself, who was unimpressed at the project’s genre and wanted something smarter, and more like the Miller brothers’ 1993 PC adventure Myst. The other? The famous red Mini from the movie’s celebrated car chase, a 1989 Mini Mayfair MkV.

But the game still had a Mini in it: an officially-licensed 2008 Mini Cooper S. Of course, this meant Bourne’s partner Marie was no longer the owner of a charming and slightly beat-up motoring icon built before the Berlin Wall came down – she was driving a brand-new, turbocharged, top-of-the-line performance hatch worth exponentially more.

Why the switch? Well, BMW wasn’t selling 1989 Mini Mayfair MkVs in 2008, was it? It was selling the 2008 Mini Cooper S – and damned if The Bourne Conspiracy was the Perfect Opportunity™ to sell a few more.

“The role of the Mini Cooper S in The Bourne Conspiracy game is a great fit for the Mini brand. As the featured vehicle and Bourne's getaway car, this integration allows us to demonstrate the agility and performance that’s inherent in the full line of Mini vehicles,” said Mini marketing communications manager Kate Alini in a June 2008 statement. “The association with The Bourne Conspiracy game and the additional promotional opportunities we’ve received will help us reach the male demographic in a powerful, organic way.”

It didn’t matter that sticking with the classic Mini would’ve kept the game faithful to the source, because the product placement opportunity of using the new BMW Mini instead was too irresistible to refuse.

It’s ancient history now, in a forgotten game from a forgotten publisher, but I’ve always considered that inane change the dorkiest and most cynical instance of marketing meddling I’ve ever observed in all my time covering the games business.

That is, until now. Congratulations, folks.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good advertisement, I guess.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.