As I’ve mentioned before, this article series is meant to serve as a living document of all the movie paint schemes that ran. Ever.
So this article — or a subsequent one — will be updated with movie schemes that run in 2026 and beyond.
But for now, we’ll finish off the Movie Paint Scheme Chronicle with years 2023 through 2025 (though I hope there’s at least one more to add across the final few weeks of this current season).
2023
Jesus Revolution
Faith-based films are, predictably, a theme we’ve seen in the lexicon of NASCAR paint schemes over the years. The liveries themselves are usually pretty dull.
None have been as vibrant as Jeffrey Earnhardt‘s No. 44 for Alpha Prime Racing in Fontana in 2023.
Jesus Revolution brought forth an appropriately ’70s-esque scheme (when the movie takes place, apparently) and it was also for a movie that’s a little less in-your-face than some of the others, so maybe that allowed them to have some more fun with the design.
After debuting at Auto Club Speedway, the car also ran at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Neither finish was much to write home about.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Movies returned to Cup cars a couple months later, when RFK Racing announced that James Gunn’s third Marvel effort, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, would appear on Brad Keselowski‘s No. 6 machine.
The scheme isn’t anything super special — admittedly not as vibrant as it could’ve been, given that film trilogy’s color palette and Gunn’s eye for great visuals — but it did stand out.
And, if nothing else, we at least got the group shot of the Guardians on the right side of the car. Brad finished 19th.
2024
Despicable Me 4
A whole year and another month later, the next movie scheme was also Keselowski, also in partnership with King’s Hawaiian and a gradient scheme like the Guardians car was.
Keselowski carried the promotion for Despicable Me 4 — an IP that DreamWorks is continuing to wring every last dollar out of, with four main-series movies and three Minions spin-offs as of next year — at Sonoma Raceway.
Not hating on the franchise, though I’ll say I’ve only seen the first two Despicable Me movies.
They’re a ton of fun, but I haven’t seen either in over a decade, and I always forget they continued making them after that.
But the No. 6 did look good and I liked the creativity of having whatever that big, round, blocky Minion’s name is biting the rear wheels. Keselowski had a slightly better effort in this car, coming home 13th.
Reagan
In the first multi-series movie promotion since Cars 3 in 2017, and the first multi-series promotion in the same weekend since Star Trek in 2009, two Joe Gibbs Racing cars sported paint schemes pushing Reagan at Daytona International Speedway last summer.
Joe Graf Jr. had a fourth-place qualifying effort for the Xfinity race, finishing 12th.
Remember when he drove for Gibbs? Yeah, me neither.
Dennis Quaid, who played Ronald Reagan in the movie, was even on hand for a press conference.
In one of my favorite movie dichotomies of late, Quaid was promoting this divisive biopic of a president … and then immediately went into promoting The Substance, an excellent body-horror flick that came out a few weeks later where he plays a disgusting, misogynistic movie executive.
The night after Graf drove Reagan/Quaid’s face around Daytona, Ty Gibbs ran a Cup car with the same scheme, starting 26th and finishing 5th.
2025
Superman
As a trading card collector, Tyler Reddick‘s Upper Deck sponsorship has been one of my favorite things in NASCAR the past couple years.
For the summer race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, things got even cooler when the new Superman film came on board the hood of the No. 45. It’s another film with the great James Gunn at the helm, the second time he’s had a movie on a car in three years and comes after his switch to the DC Comics universe, which means he’s had both Marvel and DC movies as well as Marvel and DC paint schemes.
Does he care about that? Probably not, but it’s still pretty cool.
The movie itself is great — David Corenswet is a fantastic, Christopher Reeve-esque Superman, Rachel Brosnahan is great as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult is a solid Lex Luthor — but the scheme also looked good. Especially running up front.
Ironically, this ran the same night I went to see the new F1 film with a couple friends.
Reddick recorded the best result for a movie paint scheme since Clint Bowyer with his Cars 3 car at Sonoma back in 2017, finishing fourth and looking at times like he had the win on lock in the closing laps.
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
For a while, it looked like Reddick was going to have the only movie car of the season.
That is, until the past couple of weeks. First, a SpongeBob-themed John Hunter Nemechek show car made the rounds on Twitter, but then we got at least one confirmation of a SpongeBob car for the new film The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants via Sam Hunt Racing.
Welcome to the movie lineup, SHR and Trevor Bayne.
The movie and Olipop are partnering for a sponge-themed mobile at Las Vegas Motor Speedway:
And here’s the No. 42 Nemechek show car, because since Legacy Motor Club retweeted Olipop’s post about the No. 24, I assume they’ll also have SpongeBob riding along:
That brings our grand total of movie paint schemes to 161 run across the three major series between 1989 and 2025, encompassing 117 films. They’ve definitely seen a downturn in frequency, but the hope is that one or two still make appearances each year.
We’ll look at some scheme stats next week.
So! Unless there are any more movie-themed paint jobs to finish off the 2025 season, that does it for this sub-series of Reel Racing … at least for now, until next season. Not sure what the last few articles of ’25 will bring, but in a couple weeks, I’ll pitch some movie-themed NASCAR ideas for films scheduled for 2026.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.