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 at the Las Vegas-based trade show for cinema operators and bowed in the style that the band popularized in their heyday.
Here’s the official logline: “Each man has his own story, but together they are legendary.” Mendes promised that the multi-part biopic, officially titled “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” will be the “first binge-able theatrical experience.” It’s unclear whether that means the movies will be released all at once or one per week over the course of a month.
“We need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” Mendes told the room full of 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 others 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 the four-part epic from Mendes was giving him “‘Avatar’ flashbacks.”
We all know how that gamble turned out.
