Prime Video’s Drive – The Pretenders takes a romance Harlequin rejected to No. 1

A young mechanic agrees to pose as the fiancée of racing’s most scandalous driver, so that his team can clean up his headlines and so that she can get closer to the seat she has always wanted. That is the whole contract at the centre of Drive – The Pretenders, the German-language Prime Video film directed by Sergej Moya, and audiences recognise its terms before the first lap: the fake engagement, the enemies who turn into lovers, the paddock as a ballroom.

The film arrives with a pedigree that owes more to readers than to cinema. Its source is Drive, a novel by the Florida writer Tamara Lush that a romance publisher turned down and that found its readers on Wattpad, where its reads ran into the millions. Bavaria Fiction, which produced it with Amazon MGM Studios Germany, calls it the first Wattpad adaptation conceived in Germany for the global market, and Prime Video’s own ranking says the bet paid. What the success leaves open is a question of authorship: once a story has been voted into existence by readers and filed by a streamer under a genre it already knows how to sell, how much of it can still belong to the person who directs it?

Recommended ReadingPrime Video’s Campus Drivers puts a dumped student on the ride-app boy’s couch

A familiar face and a newcomer in the driver’s seat

Lisa-Marie Koroll, who plays the mechanic Sarah Jenkins, is a known face to a German generation that grew up with the Bibi & Tina films, where she started as a child. Opposite her, Amin Baahmed plays the driver Dante Annunziata in what his management describes as his first leading role; according to TV Insider he is also a trained breakdancer and has worked as a journalist for the youth radio brands Bremen NEXT and COSMO. The pairing reads as a deliberate split: an actress the domestic audience has watched grow up, and a lead the global audience meets with no history at all. For a film built to travel, that is a hedge between familiarity and a blank slate, which is exactly what the genre asks of its couples.

Moya’s own path is stranger than the material. He began as a child actor, broke through on German television opposite Götz George and won the Undine Award for his lead in Keller – Teenage Wasteland before turning to directing. His short Hollywood Drama played in the Berlinale’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino section, and his erotic film Hotel Desire, with Clemens Schick and Saralisa Volm, was financed by crowdfunding, raising 170,000 euros before its deadline. He later made a portrait of the actor and musician Jan Josef Liefers for the broadcaster MDR. These are the credits of a director drawn to the margins of German film. An auteurist reading of Drive – The Pretenders starts there: a filmmaker who once raised money from strangers to make the film he wanted is now making a film strangers had already voted for.

A novel its author says the film improved

Lush, a former journalist based in St. Petersburg, Florida, wrote Drive as her second novel. She told the St Pete Catalyst that Harlequin rejected the manuscript, that she self-published it and then posted it on Wattpad, where it was read three million times, and that Wattpad re-published the print edition in 2022. The screenwriters changed characters and story; the heroine whom Lush’s thank-you note to readers calls Savvy is Sarah on screen. Lush does not mind. “I actually think that the way they handled it is better than the way I handled it in the book,” she told the paper. “I was just starting to learn to write romance, so I put a lot in the book that maybe I wouldn’t have put in.”

The premise sits in a long line. The racing driver as romantic lead is an old figure in European cinema, from Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, where Jean-Louis Trintignant’s driver falls for a widow between rallies, to John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, which wrapped its drivers in love affairs from Monaco to Monza. The pretend relationship that turns real belonged to screwball comedy long before it belonged to BookTok. What Drive changes, at least on paper, is who wants the car. Here the woman’s ambition drives the plot, and the engagement is her way into a cockpit as much as it is his alibi. Whether the film dramatises that ambition or only states it is something no synopsis can settle.

What a chart position does not prove

None of this proves the film is good, and the early evidence is mixed. The worldwide ranking that put it first counted only its first five days on the service, against full weeks for titles already available, as Selectra’s breakdown of Prime Video’s figures noted. A desired.de writer who watched it called it pleasant viewing for a night on the couch that does not stand out much from the crowd, and reported an IMDb user score of 5.5 out of 10 in its first days. The St Pete Catalyst found it “very sleek and very Euro”, which is a compliment and a diagnosis at once. The larger issue is structural. A story chosen by readers’ votes and placed beside Prime Video’s other young-adult romances, from Maxton Hall to Culpa Mía, arrives pre-shaped by its market. The chart measures how efficiently that shape was delivered; what a director found inside it is a separate question.

Koroll and Baahmed lead a cast that includes Gustav Schmidt, Mišel Matičević, Lucie Heinze, Frederic Linkemann, Inka Friedrich, Jeanette Hain, Philippe Brenninkmeyer, Leslie Malton, Pati Valpati and the television presenter Steven Gätjen. Chris Silber and Malina Nwabuonwor wrote the screenplay, Armin Franzen was the cinematographer and Karsten Günther produced for Bavaria Fiction. Filming ran from September to early November 2025 in and around Prague, at the circuits of Brno, Most and Hockenheim, in Frankfurt and on the Amalfi Coast.

Drive – The Pretenders has been streaming exclusively on Prime Video worldwide since October 28, 2026, in German with subtitles and with dubbed versions that include English, French and Spanish. It runs about an hour and forty minutes, and no theatrical release has been announced in the United States.

Lush wrote two more novels in her Pretenders series, Crash and Burn, set in the same racing world, but Dante’s story does not carry over into them. Asked about a sequel, she told the Catalyst she was hopeful. If one comes, it will have to invent what the books never told, and that may be the first time anyone can measure what Moya himself brings to the wheel.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: romance, Prime Video, Amin Baahmed, Drive – The Pretenders, Lisa-Marie Koroll, Sergej Moya

More Like This

Drawn Together on Prime Video: the bodyguard Ester Expósito’s father hired to watch her

‘Don’t Be Shy!’ on Prime Video: The Dumped Girl Befriends Her Ex’s New Girlfriend

The Voyeurs Turns the Gaze Back on You — and Sweeney Makes It Impossible to Look Away

The Love Hypothesis on Prime Video: Lili Reinhart makes a fake romance her next experiment

Prime Video drops ‘Ride or Die’ at its peak — a hit it rented, and Paramount now wants it back

Anne Hathaway Joins Tom Cruise in ‘Days of Thunder’ — and She’s the One Who Owns the Car