Get ready for lots of moptop in a short period of time. Sam Mendes is making four Beatles movies — and all four will be released theatrically in April 2028.
The filmmaker, who announced the news at CinemaCon, also confirmed the much-speculated casting. Paul Mescal is playing Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn will portray George Harrison, Barry Keoghan will star as Ringo Starr and Harris Dickinson will put his spin on John Lennon. The four stars came out on stage and bowed in the style that the band popularized in their heyday.
Mendes promised that the multi-part biopic, officially titled ‘The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event,’ will be the “first binge-able theatrical experience.”
“We need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” Mendes told theater owners on Monday at Sony’s presentation.
The director, whose credits include “American Beauty” and “Skyfall,” had dreamed of bringing the Fab Four to screens for years. But he didn’t want to make a mini-series and he worried that “the story was too huge to fit into a single movie.” So he came up with a plan to tell the story of “the greatest band in history” from the perspective of each of its members, to try to capture their improbable journey from Liverpool to the center of global culture. That meant four standalone features and one of the biggest bets in movie history.
“It’s a chance to understand them more deeply,” Mendes promised.
The film is also the first narrative feature to be granted music rights to the Beatles’ extensive catalog of hits such as “Strawberry Fields,” “Let It Be,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Yellow Submarine” and…way too many to mention here.
Mendes said that principal photography on the four films will take a year, a sign of just how massive an effort he’s undertaking. Tom Rothman, the Sony Pictures chief who oversaw production on a certain James Cameron sci-fi epic back when he was at Fox, joked that Mendes’ film was giving him “‘Avatar’ flashbacks.”
We all know how that gamble turned out.
