Eight days a week? How about four movies a day? That’s still the idea for the Sam Mendes-directed Beatles anthology series, which is inching ever closer to its April 2028 release. Earlier this week, producer Pippa Harris set off a wave of confusion when she insinuated the studio was considering splitting the movies, which respectively follow one Beatle at a time, into weekly installments, staggering the Beatle mania across a month. However, that would also mean revealing how much more popular John and Paul are than George and Ringo, creating a horse race scenario that forces Sony to compete with itself and secure a massive number of auditoriums for a single project. Good thing the studio recently bought the Alamo Drafthouse.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, in the interest of peace and love among the Fab Four, Sony and director Sam Mendes are still interested in dumping all four movies on a single day, finally bringing 2013’s best idea, binge-watching, to the movies. The studio is also considering bundling tickets together, so viewers could buy all tickets at once and not reveal how much more interested they are in one Beatle than the other. That should come as some relief to Ringo, who would undoubtedly suffer the most from the separate releases—unless it includes a dramatization of his “no more fan mail” video, which would do boffo B.O. It would also prevent people from leaving the John Lennon movie for streaming, which could also happen if viewers play favorites or simply grow tired of meeting the Beatles after one or three movies.
But even if they decide on separate releases, THR‘s sources say the studio wants to suppress box office data about the films. They also say the movies do not need to be viewed in any particular order. Each film is told from the perspective of a different Beatle, so one follows Barry Keoghan’s Ringo, while another follows Paul Mescal’s Paul (gee, wonder how he got that role). The rest of the cast, including Harris Dickson as John and Joseph Quinn as George, will appear in each other’s movies in hopes of creating a whole biopic universe that will hopefully be four times as successful as Michael. Whoever goes for the whole marathon, though, is sure to have a hard day’s night.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.