The Maserati brothers get a film. Pacino and Hopkins play the financiers
A Bologna workshop, a trident, and a cast list worth reading twice
The first trailer for Maserati: The Brothers landed this week, and it arrives loaded. Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Andy Garcia and Jessica Alba are all in it, under the direction of Bobby Moresco, the man who won an Oscar for writing Crash. It is due in cinemas in early November, and one of Italy's great racing names finally has its own biopic.
Then you read the character names. Not one of those four is playing a Maserati brother.
The headliners are playing somebody else
Hopkins appears as Luca Antonelli, an Italian financier. Pacino is Vincenzo Vaccaro, a wealthy Italian-American investor. Garcia is a Mr Rossini, a corporate partner. Alba is Sandra, written as Carlo Maserati's love interest. Between them, the four biggest names on the poster play the money and the romance. The brothers themselves go to a largely Italian supporting cast: Michele Morrone plays Alfieri, Salvatore Esposito plays Bindo, Matteo Bassi is Ettore, Leo Ferrari is Ernesto and Lorenzo de Moor is Carlo.
That is a deliberate structure, not an accident of scheduling. The names that sell the poster orbit the story rather than carry it, which usually means the script has built the emotional weight around mentors, backers and rivals instead of around the brothers in the title. It can work. It can also leave a film about the Maserati brothers where the Maserati brothers are the least developed people in it.
The history it has to live up to
The real story starts on 1 December 1914, when Alfieri, Ettore and Ernesto Maserati opened a workshop at via de' Pepoli 1A in Bologna. Bindo stayed in Milan at first. Another brother, Carlo, had already died in 1910, before the company existed. Mario never built a car at all: he was the painter of the family, and he drew the trident that still sits on every Maserati, lifted from the statue of Neptune in the city's main square.
The film reportedly runs from 1914 through to the end of the 1930s, which means it ends on the best possible note. Wilbur Shaw took the 8CTF, entered as the Boyle Special, to victory at the Indianapolis 500 in 1939 and again in 1940. It was the first European car to win at the Brickyard since 1919, and it was won by a company that had been a Bolognese garage twenty-five years earlier. Alfieri never saw it. He died in 1932.
The production went to the right places for it, shooting in Modena and Bologna and building the rest at Cinecitta in Rome.
We have seen this team's homework before
Moresco has already made one of these. He directed Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend in 2022, with Frank Grillo as Ferruccio, and the producer behind that film, Andrea Iervolino, is behind this one too. Critics were merciless about it. The recurring complaint was that it looked handsome, loved its cars and its Italian light, and had almost nothing to say about the people.
Maserati: The Brothers is the same creative core with a far more expensive cast and a harder story, because there is a whole family to serve rather than one stubborn tractor magnate. A bigger name on the call sheet does not fix a script. It does raise what happens if the script is fixed.
And then there is the question about the trailer itself
Watch the trailer twice and a second conversation starts. Several shots have a soft, slightly melted quality around edges and background detail that has viewers asking whether generative imagery has been used in places. Nobody involved in the film has addressed it, and there is an innocent explanation available: trailers are cut long before a film is finished, and unfinished effects shots and placeholder plates are entirely normal at this stage.
It still matters, because of what this particular film is selling. The whole promise of a period piece about Bologna in 1914 is that somebody built the thing properly, with real cars, real light and real workshops. Any doubt about that undercuts the pitch before the first ticket is sold.
Maserati could use a good one right now
The timing is either lucky or shrewd. Maserati has spent the last two years in a state most brands never come back from, falling from around 49,000 cars a year to barely 11,000, while Stellantis worked through what a turnaround actually looks like. A film is not a product plan, and no amount of Hopkins fixes a showroom.
But brand equity is exactly what Maserati is short of outside the enthusiast bubble, and a cinema audience is a bigger room than any motor show. The company already leans hard on its own past, from Classiche certifications to a limited McPura built around the 1926 Mille Miglia win. A well-made film would do more for that heritage than another special edition.
AutoNext Take
The casting tells you what this film thinks it is. Hire Hopkins and Pacino, then cast them as the financiers, and you have not made a film about the Maserati brothers. You have made a film about the idea of Italian ambition, with the brothers as scenery in their own story. That is precisely the trade the Lamborghini film made, and precisely why it was forgotten inside a month.
Which is a shame, because the truth here is better than anything a writer would invent. A dead founder, a painter brother who gave the company its face, and a car from a Bologna garage that walked into Indianapolis and beat America twice. The trident earned its drama the hard way. Somebody should trust it.
