Beatles movies 2028: Beatlemania on the resurgence ahead of 2028 four-film biopic ‘event’

Beatlemania is about to hit again, although one suspects not to the same frenzied degree as the OG movement.

Over the next few years, expect all things Beatle to take over the zeitgeist in the lead-up to what has been termed a “cinematic event”, the release of four movies about The Beatles in 2028.

The movies, directed by Sam Mendes (Skyfall, 1917), are still in production and at least 18 months away from release, but you can see mechanisms of the marketing campaign already at work.

There have been splashy roll-outs of the cast at high-profile events, a drip-feed of first images, postcards hidden in Liverpool, new attractions, and paparazzi shots and reports of filming at the Abbey Road crossing in London.

Paul McCartney will be played by Paul Mescal (Hamnet, Aftersun), John Lennon by Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl), Ringo Starr by Barry Keoghan (Saltburn, Banshees of Inisherin) and George Harrison by Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things, Gladiator II).

The casting has been well received, but McCartney did joke he had one note, which is that Mescal is shorter than Dickinson, and that in reality, the Beatles were all relatively the same height except for Starr who is a bit shorter.

McCartney recounted to Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast, “(Mendes) sent me a picture, a still from the filming they were doing, and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing, and the Paul character is markedly smaller.

“I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller? Don’t do this! You said you wouldn’t do it’.”

The rest of the casting is similarly impressive – and perhaps height appropriate – with Shogun’s Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Aimee Lou Wood (The White Lotus) as Pattie Boyd and Mia McKenna-Bruce (How to Have Sex) as Maureen Starkey.

The rest of the ensemble includes James Norton, Harry Lloyd, David Morrissey, Adam Pally, Lucy Boynton, Morfydd Clark, Ben Schwartz and Farhan Akhtar.

Each film will focus on an individual Beatle, and the movies are expected to be released within the same month, April 2028, forming a tetralogy.

The studio behind it, Sony Pictures, is placing a lot of confidence in the filmmaking team and the release structure, hoping audiences will trek out to the cinema four times in the same month to see versions of essentially the same story.

There are few predecessors that have tried anything similar. One recent example was The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, which, obviously, is a reference to a Beatles song, a film that had three iterations.

That film, which starred James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain as a young couple whose marriage was at the centre of the story, released a neutral “Them” version in September 2014, and then separately a “Him” film and a “Her” film (depicting the events from a different point-of-view) on the same day a month later.

It had a very small box office taking, but then again, that film triptych is not The Beatles.

It’s not clear exactly how the four Beatles movies and the four band members’ stories will entwine across each other’s films.

Today, news broke that The Beatles Story, an attraction in Liverpool, England will move from its current site to a location with a footprint that is four times the size.

It will include a Yellow Submarine experience and many of its exhibits will be created using sets and props that feature in Mendes’s movie. The ambition for it is to be something akin to Dollywood or Graceland, the fan meccas for Dolly Parton and Elvis fans respectively.

The timing of the move, in 2028, is likely to coincide with the release of the films as a cross-promotional opportunity.

The new attraction has, obviously, the support of surviving Beatles McCartney and Starr.

McCartney said in a statement, “I find it incredible and humbling that people are still interested in our story and it’s very exciting to me that The Beatles Story and The Beacon are being transformed in such an exciting way in the heart of Liverpool city.”

Part of the ticket sales will go towards a fun that supports emerging local artists in the city.

There’s a forthcoming attraction in London at 3 Saville Row, where the band staged its iconic 1969 rooftop concert. It was their final public performance. That is expected to open in 2027.

In their heyday, The Beatles starred in five movies including Hard Day’s Night. More than a dozen documentaries have been made, most recently the 2021 Peter Jackson film but there have been few significant fictionalised portrayals of the group.

They have mostly been characters in side stories rather than a full-blown biopic about all four, such as when Ian Hart played Lennon in the 1981 film The Hours and Times, which imagined what happened on a real holiday Lennon took with Brian Epstein.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson played Lennon in the 2009 film Nowhere Boy.