It’s official: the Beatles movie project is really happening. Director Sam Mendes announced this week he’s making four films about John, Paul, George, and Ringo, opening in theaters in April 2028. After months of rumors, he finally confirmed the cast at Cinema Con in Las Vegas. Paul McCartney is Paul Mescal from Normal People; Ringo Starr is Barry Keoghan from Saltburn. George Harrison is Joseph Quinn, who played Eddie Munson in Stranger Things and the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. John Lennon is Harris Dickinson, last seen spending a few hard day’s nights with Nicole Kidman in Babygirl.
The new Fab Four came out in Vegas, took an Ed Sullivan-style bow, and recited lines from “Sgt. Pepper.” “It’s wonderful to be here,” they told the crowd of theater owners. “It’s certainly a thrill. You’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us.”
Beatles fans have been buzzing with questions ever since the project was first announced, over a year ago. There’s so much we don’t know about (to use the clunky official title) The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event. We’ve seen a lot of Fabs movies over the years, yet there’s no precedent for one this ambitious. The rest of the cast remains unknown, but according to a confidential source, the Walrus is Paul.
All four lads are played by famous movie stars with their own acclaimed careers, grown men who’ve spent more time in the gym this week than the band did in their lives. They’re already veterans — Barry Keoghan is 32, which was Ringo’s age when the band broke up. (The youngest, Dickinson, is 28; John was up to “Revolution #9” by then.) The tag is a not-especially Beatles-level catchphrase: “Each man has his own story, but together they are legendary.” That’s Hollywood-speak for “toppermost of the poppermost.”
Sony Pictures announces the cast of
The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, directed by Sam Mendes. (l to r) Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison).
John Russo/Sony Pictures
“They’re four very different human beings,” Mendes said. “Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.” Nobody knows if all four films will open at the same time, or how much they’ll overlap, or whether they’ll be competing at the box office. “But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history. I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV miniseries just somehow didn’t feel right.”
Ringo, with his irrepressible act-naturally style, seemed to accidentally reveal Keoghan’s casting last year. “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons,” Ringo said. “I hope not too many.” Keoghan has already gotten ribbing about his shaky Liverpool accent in Saltburn. But something else he showed in Saltburn — he’s an excellent dancer, as Ringo still is at 84. It’s a shame that Margaret Qualley doesn’t get to play Paul, since she’d be perfect for the role — but at least this means somebody can make a Stones movie where she plays Mick.
Expectations are already feverishly high for this movie. Hollywood has always been obsessed with the Beatles — partly because there’s never been a movie anywhere near as popular or mythical as the story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. But nobody makes movies like this about the Stones or the Dead or Led Zeppelin. A really big music icon will get a reverent biopic or two, if they’re lucky, with actors who are basically doing a celebrity impersonation. But the Beatles are different. They play a unique role in the world’s dream-life. People really care about this one. And since hardcore Beatles fans love to complain, there are already Roses and Valeries complaining in the galleries about a movie that hasn’t even been made yet.
Mendes is a mystery in himself, since so far he hasn’t been known for music moments in his films, which include American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, Jarhead, and a couple of James Bond movies. So it’s a surprise for him to be the one tackling this — nobody really knows yet what his fan angle is, as opposed to say, a proud geek like Peter Jackson or Sofia Coppola.
Hollywood loves a music biopic — it’s one of the ironies of our time that the movies are way ahead of the music industry when it comes to feeding the audience’s insatiable appetite for rock-star stories. Bohemian Rhapsody, widely expected to be a flop in 2018, stunned everyone by making nearly a billion dollars and winning Rami Malek an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Freddy Mercury. A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, turned out brilliant, with great performances from Elle Manning, Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro, Scoot McNairy, and Boyd Holbrook. Chalamet sang all the Dylan vocals himself — no word yet on whether any of these actors will try that, a slightly heftier challenge. But everything’s different after A Complete Unknown — the bar is much higher.
It wasn’t that long ago that rock-band movies were the stuff of late-night VH1 reruns, like the Def Leppard flick where Anthony Michael Hall played Mutt Lange. But as with superhero movies, it just took Hollywood a long time to crack the code for how to do it right. Rock biopics are really just getting started. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is playing Bruce Springsteen in a flick about the making of Nebraska, Deliver Me From Nowhere; lately we’ve had announcements about Zendaya playing Ronnie Spector in a Barry Jenkins-directed bio, and Lizzo playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
The eternal problem is casting — it’s tough to make a movie about a rock star because no mere movie star is charismatic enough to play the role. If they had anywhere near that kind of cool, they’d go into music full-time. “Actors can duck and dive a bit — they constantly re-create themselves,” Nick Cave told me in 2014. “All they can do is play the role of a monster. But nobody does monster like a rock star.”
It’s especially tough in this case because these actors have to compete with the Beatles’ own four-way film chemistry, especially their manic comic energy in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Along with the millions of other things they were, the Beatles were the four funniest people on earth, and in their spare time, they made one of the silver screen’s all-time great comedy teams, up there with the Marx Brothers or Monty Python. Yellow Submarine, which they’re barely in, is a delight anyway. Peter Jackson’s Get Back showed that even in their most miserable moments, they were never NOT funny, whether it was Paul musing “to wander aimlessly is very unswinging” or John yelling, “It turns me off but blows me mind and floats me upstream!” Or, for that matter, George sneering, “Is this one called ‘I’ve Got a Feeling?’” Or Ringo doing basically anything at all.
One thing we do know for sure is that the Beatles, as an ongoing institution, have always chosen their projects carefully — since the Anthology series, the mega-ambitious 1995 documentary that kicked off a new golden age for Fabs fandom, they’ve never made a wrong move. They choose partners who get the details right, whether it’s Peter Jackson or Giles Martin. The whole movie project might seem like a crazy idea, but then so did “Rocky Raccoon.” As we now know from A Complete Unknown, you can take a music biopic that seems like a travesty on paper and make something truly great when the passion is there.
When the Fabs first hit the big time, movie stardom was theirs for the taking, just as it had been for their idol Elvis, who jumped into an insane treadmill of cranking out three crummy movies per year. But to Hollywood’s surprise, and maybe theirs, it wasn’t tempting compared to the adventures, agonies, or arguments of being Beatles together. John made an effort to be a serious actor, going off to Spain to film How I Won the War. “I had a few laughs and games of Monopoly on my film, but it didn’t work,” he said in 1967. “I didn’t meet anyone else I liked.”
Yet the movies have always been fascinated by the Beatles, as with no other musicians. The new Mendes project raises the question: why are there so many Beatles movies? The first movie version was the 1978 TV movie The Birth of the Beatles, chronicling the early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. Ian Hart played John in two excellent Nineties films: The Hours and Times, a 1991 fictionalized account of John and Brian Epstein on a weekend holiday, and Backbeat, a 1994 fictionalized account of John’s bond with Stu Sutcliffe. There’s the 2009 John biopic Nowhere Boy, the 2019 Danny Boyle rom-com Yesterday, the 2007 Julie Taylor cult musical Across the Universe, the 1978 cult comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand. And you can’t forget The Rutles mockumentary All You Need Is Cash — “a musical legend that will last a lunchtime.” Midas Man, the Brian Epstein film, bombed earlier this year; Brian deserves a do-over.
We should probably also mention the Seventies flop Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the Bee Gees as the band, Peter Frampton as Billy Shears, and Steve Martin as Dr. Maxwell Edison, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and so on. Turning this psychedelic concept album into a big-budget Hollywood musical was a disaster so legendary, they should have awarded honorary Oscars to the dealers on the set.
But my favorite movie about the Beatles has to be Two of Us, which debuted on VH1 25 years ago, in early 2000. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who made Let It Be as well as the “Hey Jude” video, made it a loving fantasy about John and Paul—the movie holds up better and better over the years. The premise: Paul knocks at John’s apartment in 1976, they spend a day together talking about their issues, they watch Saturday Night Live as Lorne Michaels offers them a chance to reunite for “three THOUSAND dollars!” Jared Harris is the best movie John ever, licking his lips and sucking his teeth; Aidan Quinn is the best movie Paul. Macca called it “a great film” on a radio interview at the time, though he scoffed at the scene where they wander Central Park in disguise: “Are you mad, son?”
The Beatles remain the world’s favorite story, getting more beloved every year. Their friend Derek Taylor called them “the 20th century’s greatest romance,” but as it turns out, the 20th century was just the beginning. You couldn’t dream up any idea for a movie as ridiculous as this one — two teenage nowhere boys find each other in a nowhere town, grow up together, inspire each other to write songs, bring out each other’s genius. They pick up a couple of kindred spirits in their town, start a rock & roll group. Together, they make the world fall madly in love, permanently in love, like it’s never fallen in love with anything else.
“There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation,” Mendes told the Vegas audience. “I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore.” But nobody has ever needed to sell the Beatles to any new generation, because the music and the story refuse to fade into the past, which is also why there’s no “still” about it. The lads share a bond that anyone can hear in their music, which is why they’ve come to symbolize the whole idea of friendship (the ultimate “us against the world” story) as well as the idea of friendship ending (the ultimate “breaking up” story). The Beatles might be — as Mendes says — “too huge to fit” in a movie version. But that’s why — now as always — they’re a story too irresistible for Hollywood to let it be.
