Get ready to meet The Beatles. The four stars of Sam Mendes‘ ambitious The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event were unveiled at CinemaCon tonight, and they are Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison. Not only do we now have the cast for the four interlinked movies, but we now know they’ll have a uniquely audacious release strategy. You might have to hit the theater eight days a week because Sony Pictures will release all four movies in April 2028.
The cast were all on hand for the crowd of theatrical exhibitors and journalists, including Collider’s Britta DeVore, in Las Vegas, making their first public appearance to a crowd only slightly less enthusiastic than the throngs of Beatlemaniacs who greeted the real deal on The Ed Sullivan Show. Mendes was on hand as well and declared the unique release schedule to be the “first bingeable theatrical experience.” He defended it, stating, “Frankly, we need big cinematic events to get people out of the house.” In regard to the films themselves, he said that each Beatle will get their own film, but the films “intersect in different ways.” It’s a daunting task for the quartet who will play the Beatles, although all have had high-profile projects recently: Dickinson steamed up the screen with Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, Paul Mescal filled Russell Crowe‘s sandals in Gladiator II, Keoghan was Oscar-nominated for his role in The Banshees of Inisherin, and Quinn will burn bright as the Human Torch in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps.
What Other Movies Have Been Made About the Beatles?
There have been many movies chronicling the lives of the members of the Beatles, but no project has rivaled Mendes’ four-film event in scope. The Beatles themselves, of course, appeared in several films as fictionalized versions of themselves, including A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Magical Mystery Tour. They have also been the subject of innumerable documentaries: most recently, Peter Jackson exhaustively assembled the footage of the band’s last recording session into The Beatles: Get Back, while Martin Scorsese chronicled the early days of Beatlemania in Beatles ’64.
The late Lennon is the most-explored Beatle on film: Aaron Taylor-Johnson played a teenaged Lennon in 2009’s Nowhere Boy, Ian Hart played an older Lennon in 1991’s The Hours and Times, and Jared Leto portrayed his assassin in 2007’s Chapter 27. Stuart Sutcliffe, the band’s original bassist, was portrayed by Steven Dorff in the 1994 biopic Backbeat. And, of course, no Beatles cinematic retrospective would be complete without discussing the disastrous 1978 cinematic adaptation of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which starred Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, and a number of embarrassed thespians.
Mendes won the Academy Award for Best Director for 1999’s American Beauty and was also nominated for his World War I epic 1917. His most recent film was 2022’s Empire of Light, an examination of the magic of cinema set in 1980s Britain.
All four films of The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event will be released in theaters in April 2028. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
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