Last summer, the ever-suave Brad Pitt returned to the tentpole scene with one of 2025’s most impressive cinematic experiences. Joseph Kosinski‘s racing blockbuster F1, which stars Pitt as Sonny Hayes, was a huge hit both critically and commercially. Not only did the film eventually take home the prize for Best Sound from this year’s 98th Academy Awards ceremony and earn a nod in the coveted Best Picture category, but it also broke box office records, becoming the highest-grossing original movie of the year and Apple Original Film’s highest-grossing theatrical release of all time with a $633 million worldwide haul.
The film is yet another in a long line of huge success stories for Pitt on the big screen, with it remarkably now 35 years since he first broke onto the scene as small-time drifter J.D. in directorRidley Scott‘s Thelma & Louise. Of all his many masterpieces, one that flies too far under the radar is the drama film Babel, which debuted in 2006 and was Pitt’s only acting performance of the year. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who earned his first Best Director nod for the film, Babel was also the recipient of five other Academy Award nominations, sadly only winning one in the Best Original Score category (Gustavo Santaolalla).
At the box office, the film proved even more successful than its underwhelming night at the Oscars, with Babel scoring a global haul of $132 million against a production budget of just $20 million. Mohamed Akhzam, Cate Blanchett,Elle Fanning, Satoshi Nikaido, and more feature in this ambitious multi-narrative drama that tells a selection of interconnected stories across the world in Morocco, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. As of August 1, you can watch Babel on Paramount+ in the U.S., where it joins an impressive collection of arriving titles.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
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🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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Brad Pitt’s Next Project Sees One of His Best Characters Return
Image via Paramount Pictures
Back in February 2020, Pitt picked up the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, the 2019 historical drama set in 1969 Los Angeles. Later this year, he will reprise the role in The Adventures of Cliff Booth, which will have a two-week exclusive run in IMAX starting November 25, before moving to Netflix worldwide on December 23. Tarantino has penned the project, with long-time Pitt collaborator David Finchertaking director’s duties.
Babel is streaming on Paramount+. Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.
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