This week, Sony officially announced the cast for The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event. Sam Mendes, who will direct all four movies, took the stage at CinemaCon alongside the actors playing the Fab Four: Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney. People have all sorts of strong opinions about that cast, but it’s been rumored for a long time, so none of it was surprising to me. I’ve enjoyed work from all those guys, and I think they all have the potential to nail it.
Especially Harris Dickinson. I bought Harris Dickinson stock after seeing The Iron Claw and it only increased in value after Babygirl.
Now And Then Becomes Then And Then And Then And Then
What is surprising is the announced release schedule. All four films are being planned for release in April 2028. That means that, if Sony sticks to this schedule, you’ll be able to see all four movies in theaters at the same time, even on the same day. To that end, Mendes said that Sony Motion Pictures executive Tom Rothman referred to the films as the first “bingeable moment in cinema.”
It isn’t yet clear how closely the films’ release dates will be to each other. Sony may release them over the month’s four weekends, or put them all in theaters on the same day.
It’s an interesting idea that, on the one hand, seems to meet the demand of our event-ized times. Barbenheimer was a box office juggernaut because people turned out in droves to participate in a much-memed cultural moment. Minions: The Rise of Gru made nearly a billion dollars in 2022, in part, because of the #GentleMinions social media trend.
Whether the movie is an indie horror film like Longlegs or a behemoth like Avatar: The Way of Water, marketing has to make audiences feel like they’re part of something by showing up — at least as long as tickets and concessions continue to be as expensive as they are. The Beatles movies are offering audiences an opportunity to be a part of something that has never really happened before. From that perspective, I can see how Sony arrived at this plan.
But the appeal of Barbenheimer was that they were two very different movies. It’s the whole reason the double feature took off as a meme. One was a drama, one was a comedy. One was primarily targeted at women, the other at men. One was dark, the other bright pink. One was about a toy, the other was about the nuclear bomb. The movies were good on their own, but were elevated by the unlikely pairing.
Music Biopics Don’t Feel Different Enough
Four movies from the same director in the same genre with the same cast don’t have the peanut butter and jelly appeal. That’s especially true since the genre is music biopic, known (especially post-Walk Hard) for its heavy reliance on familiar tropes and a tried-and-true rise and fall then rise again structure. Do you want to sit in a theater for eight-plus hours of the same thing?
Now, Sam Mendes might take the project in an interesting direction. He might explore The Beatles’ different personalities through different genres. George Harrison and John Lennon were very different people and giving them the same kind of movie doesn’t make much sense. Mendes might opt to tell The Beatles’ story chronologically across the four movies, giving us their early career in the John movie, their breakout success in the Paul movie, their solo careers in the George movie, and the later years in the Ringo movie — or something similarly fractured. If they all feel the same, I don’t see how this works on any level.
There’s also going to be the weird inherent competition between the movies which will play out in box office receipts. Do people want to see Paul or John more? Does that reflect on The Beatles? The actors playing them? Something else?
Movie studios tend to avoid releasing similar movies at the same time, preferring to spread their slate out so they don’t have, for example, two horror flicks fighting for the same audience. How could four films about the same band not fall prey to the same phenomenon? How could the Paul movie not cannibalize the Ringo movie if they’re all playing at the same time? It just doesn’t seem feasible.
I admire Sony’s innovation, but this seems like an idea that hasn’t been tried because it can’t possibly work. And I suspect that, as April 2028 draws nearer, Sony will come to the same conclusion. There’s simply no way these movies actually all release in the same month.
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