Ford Racing has turned the origin story of the F-150 Raptor into a 90-second mini-movie called “Project Raptor: Based on a Ford Story,” directed by Ben Affleck and starring Jon Bernthal. Two Hollywood Raptor owners telling the story of a truck they actually drive is a smart casting idea on paper. On screen, it is a handsome, punchy piece of brand mythmaking that knows exactly which buttons to press, and presses most of them a little too hard.
WHAT HAPPENS ON SCREEN
The film opens on a wide desert shot and a dust plume, then cuts inside a dark, amber-lit workshop where engine parts, bolts and a stripped chassis are laid out like evidence. Bernthal narrates from behind the wheel, setting up the premise with a horror-movie line: “How do you make a monster? It is not always loose brains and lightning.” The monster, of course, is the truck, and the mad scientists are three real Ford Racing engineers, Derek Bier, Tim Smith and Chris Paiva, who appear as themselves in silhouette, at workbenches and around a half-built prototype.
The story is the one Ford has told for years: in 2006 a small team wanted to take the off-road racer they ran in Baja and make it street legal for everyone. Bernthal tells us the project “got killed six times,” and the film literally stamps “CANCELLED” across a Project Scope sheet to prove it. The engineers keep going anyway, and the back half of the spot is pure payoff: a red, decal-covered early Raptor flying across dry lake beds, kicking up sand and landing jumps, intercut with Bernthal’s face in the cab and an “F150” reflected in the rear-view mirror. It ends with a convoy of Raptors across the desert and the Raptor and Ford Racing logos.
CREDITS
Brand: Ford Racing (Ford Motor Company). Film: “Project Raptor: Based on a Ford Story,” 1:31, published on the official Ford Racing YouTube channel on October 23, 2026. Creative and brand studio: Artists Equity, the studio co-founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Director: Ben Affleck. Talent: Jon Bernthal, with Ford Racing engineers Derek Bier, Tim Smith and Chris Paiva. Credits per Ford Racing’s YouTube description, Road and Track and Campaign US; Campaign US also names Wieden+Kennedy as a partner, which Ford’s own description does not mention. The spot aired during college football on Apple TV and during the United States Grand Prix broadcast in Austin.
THE EXECUTION
Affleck shoots it like the opening of a sports drama. The workshop scenes are moody and warm, the engineers are lit like a heist crew, and the desert footage is genuinely kinetic. Reports say the crew needed a second camera-rigged Raptor just to keep up with the hero truck, and you can feel that speed in the low tracking shots. Using the real engineers instead of actors is the best decision in the film: their faces carry a credibility no casting call could buy, and Ford’s microsite backs it up with short profiles of each of them.
Bernthal is a natural fit. He owns three Raptors, including a first-generation truck, and he played Lee Iacocca in Ford v Ferrari, so the gravelly narrator voice comes with built-in Ford history. The “monster” framing gives the spot a clear spine, and the cancellation stamp is a neat, legible beat that makes the underdog story land in seconds.
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T
What works: the premise is true, the people are real and the product is the hero of every exterior shot. This is not a celebrity sitting next to a car; it is a celebrity explaining why a group of engineers refused to quit, and the truck doing what those engineers built it to do. For an enthusiast audience that already knows the Raptor, the film is a love letter that respects them.
What doesn’t: it is very much a trailer for a movie that does not exist. Ninety seconds is not enough to make Bier, Smith and Paiva into characters, so they end up as moody silhouettes while Bernthal does the talking. The six cancellations are stated, not dramatized, and the “mad scientist” metaphor is laid on with a trowel, from the Frankenstein line to the sparks and amber haze. The visual grammar, dark garage, dramatic voiceover, slow push-ins and a dust-plume finale, is the same one every performance truck ad has used for a decade. Affleck makes it look expensive, but he does not make it look new. And outside the Raptor faithful, a story about a 2006 development program is a hard sell to anyone deciding which truck to buy in 2026.
VERDICT
“Project Raptor: Based on a Ford Story” is a well-crafted, confident piece of heritage storytelling with an honest hook: real engineers, a real fight inside the company and a truck that still delivers on the promise. Bernthal sells it, Affleck shoots it with real muscle, and the desert footage is a pleasure. It just plays the underdog-garage-genius story by the book, and the people it claims to celebrate barely get a word in. Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
