In a gamble so crazy it just might work, director Sam Mendes has teamed up with the two living Beatles for a truly ambitious project: four different movies, each from the perspective of a different member of the band, all slated for release in 2027. “I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement, which boasted that this is the first time that Apple Corps Ltd — the rights holder to the Beatles catalog — as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted life story and music rights for a scripted feature film.
Each film will be told from the point of view of a different band member, and will eventually “intersect to tell the astonishing story of the greatest band in history.” Sony will distribute the films worldwide in 2027 and with this intriguing promise: “The dating cadence of the films, the details of which will be shared closer to release, will be innovative and groundbreaking.”
Is it really true that you couldn’t tell the story of The Beatles in a single feature film? Who knows. But this is undeniably a big swing, an upfront commitment to four feature films and an assumption that come 2027, audiences will buy tickets to the first one and then be clamoring to come back for the next three. The commitment, oddly enough, feels like a vote of confidence in Kevin Costner’s gamble for this summer, a two-part original Western that Warner Bros. will release in theaters on June 28 and then on August 16. But it also could be a sign of where the movie industry is headed in general, away from the tangled cinematic universes that have worn us all out and toward what television has been excelling at for over a decade: the limited series.
Yes, yes, single stories told in multiple installments have been around as long as there’s been a Hollywood, and making four Beatles movies at the same time is not so different from committing to three Lord of the Rings films back in the late 90s. But it’s not hard to imagine film executives looking enviously at what HBO has with The White Lotus or Netflix had with The Queen’s Gambit, stories that captivate people for hours upon hours and inspire them to keep coming back for more — except, if you’re in the theater, that means paying to come back for more. The upfront commitment to multiple feature films is a risk that doesn’t always pay off, as Universal’s attempted Exorcist franchise reboot has proven.
But if we learned anything from the weeks of discussion around Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series Get Back, The Beatles still hold a unique fascination — and, somehow, there are still new stories to tell about them. Sony is certainly not holding back in promising just how much these films have the potential to upend biopic expectations: “Theatrical movie events today must be culturally seismic,” studio chief Tom Rothman said in a statement. “Sam’s daring, large-scale idea is that and then some.” Now he’s got three years to make good on that.
