English director Sam Mendes will release four movies about The Beatles in the same month, the director announced Monday, with Paul Mescal playing Paul McCartney and Barry Keoghan portraying Ringo Starr in "the first bingeable theatrical experience."
The "four-film cinematic event," hitting theaters in April 2028, will each focus on a different member of the legendary British pop quartet, with Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.
"Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys. They intersect in different ways -- sometimes overlapping, sometimes not," Mendes told the CinemaCon movie theater convention in Las Vegas.
"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."
Filming is about to begin, and is expected to take more than a year, said Mendes. The exact order in which the movies will be released has not yet been revealed.
"I'd been trying to make a film about the Beatles for years, but I had temporarily given up," explained "American Beauty" Oscar-winner Mendes.
"I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV mini-series just somehow didn't feel right."
The announcement came at the start of the CinemaCon trade convention, where movie theater owners gather annually in Las Vegas to hear Hollywood studios' plans for the coming months and years.
While 2025 had been widely touted as the year that the movie industry would bounce back, the box office has so far endured a terrible start, reeling from high-profile flops like Disney's live-action "Snow White" and sci-fi "Mickey 17."
The $1.3 billion taken in North America receipts so far is seven percent below an already lean Q1 2024, which was itself derailed by the previous year's massive Hollywood strikes.
All this is roiling an industry that has never fully returned to pre-pandemic profit levels, and had informally adopted the motto "Survive till '25."
So CinemaCon at the Caesars Palace casino is a key chance for Hollywood to present upcoming films to theater owners -- and, hopefully, inspire a bit of confidence that the good times are coming back.
Source: AFP
Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
