A fake engagement from Wattpad reaches Prime Video in every market on October 28

Prime Video published the trailer for Drive - The Pretenders on Monday, October 19, 2026, a German-language film in which a race car mechanic pretends to be engaged to a champion driver. The film, adapted from Tamara Lush's Wattpad novel, streams worldwide on October 28.

Two people with a reason other than love

The mechanic is Sarah Jenkins, played by Lisa-Marie Koroll. The driver is Dante Annunziata, played by Amin Baahmed, who according to the Prague Reporter has a reputation as a scandal-prone bad boy. UPI describes the story as enemies-to-lovers: the two agree to a fake engagement to help mend his reputation, while Sarah hopes the arrangement will eventually give her a chance behind the wheel herself.

Prime Video's official synopsis, quoted by UPI, says the lie soon "threatens to destroy everything, including what has long since become more than just a game."

The supporting cast includes Gustav Schmidt, Mišel Matičević, Inka Friedrich, Jeanette Hain and Leslie Malton. The film is directed by Sergej Moya from a screenplay by Chris Silber and Malina Nwabuonwor, and produced by Bavaria Fiction with Amazon MGM Studios Germany. Amazon's own announcement, written by Charles Clark and dated October 19, is the primary source for those credits. It is also a company describing its own product, and it contains no runtime, no age rating and no quotes from the cast or crew, as the trade site PPC Land points out.

Baahmed takes his first leading feature role as Dante, according to the Prague Reporter, after earlier work as a dancer and a journalist. Amazon's own wording is more breathless than UPI's. It calls the film a "romantic drama" in which "Enemies become lovers and passion ignites on and off the racetrack." That is a sentence written to be shared, and it names the genre's whole bargain.

Nobody has seen the film yet, so everything above comes from a trailer post and a synopsis. What the premise promises is a familiar shape: a bond that begins as a performance and is then caught out by its own feelings.

From a Wattpad story to 26 days in Prague

The story first found its readers on Wattpad, the online story platform. According to the Prague Reporter, Lush's Drive built an audience there before it was released as a published novel, and it is part of a three-book series. Prime Video has not announced plans for further adaptations.

Readers first, money later.

That path matters for a romance, because the readers arrive before the budget does. A novel that already has fans arrives with a verdict half written. PPC Land reads the pattern as a strategy: a Wattpad novel with an existing fan base gives a local production "a built-in audience abroad."

The shoot itself was less glamorous than the pit lane. The Prague Reporter, citing the Czech Film Commission, says the production spent 26 shooting days in Czechia in the fall of 2025. The Prague Reporter adds that Czech viewers will be able to spot familiar locations standing in for the film's international world. The production used Prague streets and landmarks including Pařížská and Ostrovní streets, the Rudolfinum concert hall and the Municipal House, as well as Barrandov Studios, and went on to Brno for the racing sequences. International filming also took place in Germany and along Italy's Amalfi Coast.

The Prague Reporter's critic, Jason Pirodsky, adds that although the film is set among racing teams, it approaches that setting "primarily through romance rather than sports drama."

What a sociologist heard in 41 love stories

A fake engagement is a story told about love, and love stories have a habit of following a pattern. A study in the journal Sexuality & Culture, summarized by the University of Montreal on October 12, 2026, suggests that people tell their own stories with remarkable consistency.

Jules Pector-Lallemand, a sociologist, followed 41 adults aged 18 to 35 in Montreal, Paris and New York over four years, and 13 of them more intensively for a year and a half. The sample included heterosexual and LGBTQ+ participants, monogamous and nonmonogamous people, couples and singles. The work comes from his doctoral research, supervised by Barbara Thériault, and he also worked as a dishwasher in a Montreal bar to observe small gestures such as a hand on the lower back.

Almost everyone began with the same complaint. "Dating apps are like fast food, like a supermarket," was the refrain he kept hearing, often with the added thought that things used to be different. Some participants even diagnosed themselves: "I've developed a fear of commitment, rejection phobia, an anxious attachment style." The prevailing pessimism, he notes, echoes the sociologist Eva Illouz. Yet when he asked them to tell their own stories, the tone changed. He found three recurring stages: the miracle, heroism and healing.

In the first, respondents said they were not looking for love, or were even wary of it, when it happened to them. No one, he said, "explicitly said it was fate," yet "fate was always there in the subtext." In the second, they described overcoming a fear before they could commit. The key moment, Pector-Lallemand said, is when they dare to "show vulnerability" by revealing their fears, anxieties and past wounds, and the road to the first declaration of love is never described as smooth. Love, in these accounts, is no longer something that happened to them; they earned it, slowly, one disclosure at a time. In the third, the relationship healed an old wound.

Pector-Lallemand draws a conclusion that suits a genre built on clichés. "Criticizing romantic clichés is just as much a part of the discourse of love as the clichés themselves," he said. People contrast their own love with a degraded age, he argues, so that each believes theirs is the exception. He cites a French survey in which 80% of respondents said we live in an unromantic age but 64% said they themselves were romantic, a figure that rose to 74% among young respondents. The article does not name the survey or its date.

He disagrees with Illouz, whose books Why Love Hurts (2012) and The End of Love (2019) argue for a decline of romantic love. The statistics, he says, show that the proportion of people in relationships in Canada was roughly the same in 2021 as in 1921, and that divorce rates have been declining since the late 1980s.

Two limits apply. The research is qualitative, drawn from 41 people in three cities, and it studied how people narrate their own lives, not how they respond to films or novels. Nothing in it concerns Drive. What it offers is a frame: a story in which the feeling arrives after an arrangement made for other reasons sits close to the way these participants told theirs.

Where the film sits in Amazon's slate

Amazon places the film in a line of young-adult romances. Its announcement mentions the German series Maxton Hall, the Spanish Culpables films, which it says have drawn "over 100 million viewers worldwide," and the sequel Love Me Love Me 2, due in 2027. Amazon does not say over what period the 100 million were counted.

Prime Video calls Maxton Hall its most-watched International Original series, according to PPC Land, and season three is due on December 9, 2026. The comparison closer to Drive's premise is the one UPI draws: Prime Video recently released The Love Hypothesis, a romantic comedy based on Ali Hazelwood's novel, and a recent Reflets brief on Hazelwood's sequel covers what comes after that story's fake relationship.

The announcement ends, as streaming announcements do, with a membership pitch. A film about a pretended engagement is introduced by a post that ends on a price, $14.99 a month or $139 a year in the US. PPC Land notes that Amazon reported an average ad-supported audience of 315 million viewers in its fourth-quarter 2025 results, and more than 17 million ad-supported monthly customers in Germany at its June 4, 2025 upfront.

For viewers in the United States and the United Kingdom, the practical question is language. The film is German-language, and Amazon's page does not say which dubbed or subtitled versions will be offered outside German-speaking markets, according to PPC Land.

Dates to keep

The film arrives on Prime Video on October 28, 2026, worldwide. The third season of Maxton Hall follows on December 9, 2026.

Whether Sarah and Dante's arrangement survives its own feelings is what the trailer sells and what viewers will judge from the film itself.

Sources

• Watch the trailer for 'Drive – The Pretenders', Amazon, Charles Clark, October 19, 2026