Director Sam Mendes to launch four Beatles movies in same month
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(From left) Film director Sam Mendes and actors Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, Barry Keoghan and Harris Dickinson at the CinemaCon trade convention in Las Vegas on March 31.
PHOTO: AFP
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LAS VEGAS – Sam Mendes will release four movies about The Beatles in the same month, the British director announced on March 31, with Irish actors Paul Mescal playing Paul McCartney and Barry Keoghan portraying Ringo Starr in “the first bingeable theatrical experience”.
The “four-film cinematic event”,
“Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys. They intersect in different ways – sometimes overlapping, sometimes not,” Mendes, 59, told the CinemaCon movie theatre 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 expected to take more than a year, said Mendes, who won the Best Director Oscar for the film American Beauty (1999). 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,” said 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 miniseries just somehow didn’t feel right.”
The announcement came at the start of the CinemaCon trade convention, where cinema 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 such as Disney’s live-action Snow White and science-fiction Mickey 17.
The US$1.3 billion (S$1.7 billion) taken in North America receipts so far is 7 per cent below an already lean first quarter of 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 cinemas owners – and, hopefully, inspire a bit of confidence that the good times are coming back.
Spidey and Bond?
The event kicked off on March 31 with a presentation from Sony Pictures.
As well as sharing news about Mendes’ Beatles movies, the studio unveiled information about its wildly popular Spider-Man films.
A live-action film starring English actor Tom Holland, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, was confirmed for July 2026, while animated movie Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse received a June 2027 release date.
The studio also teased the upcoming film 28 Years Later, a long-in-development apocalyptic horror sequel from English director Danny Boyle, starring English actors Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes.
Boyle, 68, nodded to speculation about the next actor to play James Bond by joking that Taylor-Johnson may or may not be the next Bond – and how Fiennes probably should have been.
Later in the week at CinemaCon, Amazon MGM will give a major presentation, just days after unveiling new producers for the 007 franchise it spent billions of dollars acquiring.
Warner Bros will be desperate to recover from flops like The Alto Knights – a Robert De Niro film that took just US$5 million worldwide on its recent opening weekend, despite having cost US$45 million to make.
The studio has a mouth-watering line-up, including the film One Battle After Another, starring American actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and a major new Superman film that it hopes can revitalise its entire flagging DC superhero franchise.
In a near-annual tradition, Paramount will showcase its latest Mission: Impossible film, prompting the inevitable rumours of an appearance by Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise on the stage of the casino’s giant auditorium.
Other studios due to present this week include Universal Pictures, with its latest Jurassic World and Wicked sequels, and Lionsgate, home of Canadian actor Keanu Reeves’ many John Wick movies.
Disney, with an ever-growing roster of Marvel superheroes and a new Avatar sequel due in December, will wrap up the event on April 3. AFP
