- Little Help From Our Friends? - September 2, 2026
- A quick yawp from Mr. History - August 24, 2026
- First Thoughts on “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” - August 17, 2026
Let’s begin here: Movie making is so collaborative, so expensive, and so many things can go wrong, that it’s a miracle any of them are any damn good. And I so want these to be good.
I’ve never seen a movie up close, but my wife worked on several high-profile prestige TV shows in the 2010s — “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” I saw how the sausage was made on both projects, and the drama was as intense behind the cameras as in front of them. A big Hollywood production would be 10x more collaborative than that, with 10x more financial pressure on everyone.
So when I heard that Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty and Skyfall was attempting a quadrology of The Beatles’ story via four separate biopics all released simultaneously in April 2028, I was…concerned.
Concerning.
The first hurdle for Mendes’ films will be one you might not think of. We already have a superb movie version of The Beatles, which is called A Hard Day’s Night. The J/P/G/R in AHDN are not the real gents; they are characters, scripted by Alun Owen, and played quite successfully by John, Paul, George, and Ringo themselves. If you want to see what happens when they are less successful, watch HELP!. The problem with HELP! isn’t simply that the guys were swacked out of their minds on pot during the shoot; it’s that the unrealistic script puts much more pressure on the Fabs to act realistically as themselves, and since they weren’t actors and could only really play themselves (and the occasional “Mr. Papadopoulos“) with some effort, being high all the time robbed them of the ability to concentrate as they had for AHDN. The pot, plus the script, showed how hard it is for anybody to convincingly portray a Beatle, even the Beatles themselves.
But even a shaky Beatles performance is better than other actors playing them, for an obvious reason: The Beatles are the most photographed, most interviewed, best-known people of the modern era. This means that anyone who plays them besides them, will have to bridge an uncanny valley. Nearly every fan — and certainly any serious fan — carries around a version of each Beatle in their head, and woebetide the piece of fiction that does not line up. A movie like Nowhere Boy smartly sidesteps all this by telling the story of Lennon before he was a Beatle.
Mendes’ project is confronting this problem head on — the “uncanny valley” issue and our already having seen the perfect actors playing The Beatles — and he will need one hell of a script, supported by great acting, to get us to forget all that. Younger fans probably won’t care. But the older a fan is, the harder it’s going to be to make this leap. If any one of them doesn’t make the grade, all four movies will suffer. If all four actors get it 75% right, all four movies will be unwatchable.
Well, what about the script?
Here are the writers:
Jez Butterworth (b. 1969) wrote Ford vs. Ferrari, which I adored…but that’s a perfect example of a film based on historical events where accuracy doesn’t mean anything. Nobody went into that movie as a Carroll Shelby superfan. Nobody settled into their seats with a bag of popcorn and really strongly held opinions about the relationship between Enzo Ferrari and Henry Ford II. Mendes’ Beatles movies are a completely different kettle of fish, where any deviation from the factual narrative is going to attract comment, and viewer resistance. People will “bump on stuff,” as they say in the biz.
Peter Straughan‘s (b. 1968) credits include Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Conclave, once again really strong films…with no viewer opinion as to the subject matter. With TTSS, there might have been a few asses in seats who, like me, knew and loved the late 70s BBC version — starring a weary-looking Alec Guinness and an even wearier-looking England — well enough to bristle a bit at different choices in the movie. Conclave is a thoroughly gripping fictional look at a real process, the election of a Pope. It, unlike Mendes’ biopics, is completely untethered from a real story we all know and have opinions about. I was just rewatching Wolf Hall, which Straughan wrote, and it’s wonderful. But as long as his Henry VIII was entertaining, I wasn’t going to quibble over details; I didn’t know them, and didn’t care. When it comes to the life stories of The Beatles, viewers will.
As for Jack Thorne (b. 1978), I haven’t seen enough of his work to be able to comment intelligently or respectfully. Great resume, though.
All of these three seem like people working at the top of their field — splendid writers. If anybody can pull this off, these three can. But is it possible?
It’s a great story, that’s for sure. But we all know it — and once again, the older you are, the better you’ll know it, and the more you’ll have invested in the story, the more times you’ll have watched “Anthology,” or read a (or every) biography. These films can’t have the same relationship that say, Stranger Things has with the media of the early 80s. This is not an homage to The Beatles. They cannot feel like pastiche, and I’m saying that as a writer whose talent unquestionably tops out at pastiche. Each movie, and all four together, have to feel absolutely authentic. For the script to be truly great — if it’s going to tell us deeper truths than the ones we all know by heart — it will have to take liberties with real life; but the more liberties it takes, the more fans are going to be reminded of the artificiality of the whole endeavor. Yipes!
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L.P. Hartley, 1953
Until Brian Epstein’s death, one of the primary sources of Beatles magic was their splendid luck with collaborators. Joe Orton, one of the stellar playwrights of his generation, would’ve been entirely unsuitable; Al Brodax, who gave us the execrable Beatles cartoon, also gave us the immensely more consequential movie Yellow Submarine. I don’t know if AHDN would’ve even gotten off the ground without Alan Owun, the Welsh Liverpudlian and ace TV writer who captured the fellows’ banter so effortlessly.
Perhaps the best guide to understanding a person is another person from the same time and place. Whatever Liverpool is today, it’s not what it was in 1940; the same could be said for rock and roll in the 1950s; or England in the Swinging Sixties. Two Beatles — arguably the two most perceptive and insightful — are dead. The other two are deep into their 80s and notoriously flexible with their memories. There are simply very few people living today of the Beatles’ generation who grew up in Liverpool when/as they did; Mendes’ movies will require research, of a kind that probably very few people could do, and sympathy as great as any historian who ever lived. Does this sound like the skillset of a Hollywood scriptwriter? Not the ones I know. It’s one thing to create Don Draper out of a fanatical dedication to set-dec and telling details (I remember the day I got a phone call: “Hi, honey. Can you call up your old Yale Record friends and ask what the dues were for the Westchester Country Club in 1959?”). It’s quite another thing to recreate a famous person who we all think we know.
If people of the Beatles’ generation are fewer and fewer, the same can be said, sadly, for the Baby Boom generation. Even first-generation fans are quite long in the tooth, succumbing to the maladies of the flesh at an alarming rate. Three-score and ten is the time allotted in the Bible, and they are, one by one, hitting that limit. Could this help the movie, having lots of people who knew what it was really like, already dead? Perhaps.
Mendes and his writers are all second-generation fans, something I know a bit about. Second generation fans such as myself (b. 1969) can get you to some interesting places with The Beatles, as this site shows. For us, The Beatles story has always been historical, and we’ve had an ability to study it with more distance than first-generation fans; my opinion of Magical Mystery Tour isn’t colored by my memories of Christmas 1967. But second-gen Beatles fans aren’t completely trustworthy either — we’ve never lived in a world without the Beatles. The world changed massively in the wake of The Beatles, so they say — and while second-gen fans can collect sources confirming this, they can’t really feel it. Something as foundational to the Beatles’ story as long hair on men, we have no idea why that’s was a big deal…only that it was. The relationship of Yoko to a UK public still harboring memories of the Japanese during World War II? To a second-generation fan, that just looks like racism — but it’s not so simple, and that has to come out in drama. Yoko herself probably had/has very mixed feelings about English and Americans, based on her own childhood.
Finally, second-generation fandom was shaped by Lennon’s murder and its aftermath. Just as millennials tend to dismiss Lennon as a wife-beating asshole, we second-gens have a hard time not seeing him a some kind of secular saint, and his wife as a blessed widow, the rightful gatekeeper to his legacy. Which is a severe distortion/flattening of both of them.
Night and Day (1946), starring Cary Grant as Cole Porter
The Beatles’ story is strange and magical, the most magical one I know. The life of each man is deep and dark — full of the primal drives necessary to make the story happen, and occurences too dark for anyone else to imagine, balancing the light and sunny things we know. Even with these splendid writers and this director, it’s difficult to see how these movies won’t end up as hagiographies, tuned to the preferences of young moviegoers born and living in an entirely different world. Even if accuracy was their goal — and it cannot be, any more than Night and Day could haul Cole Porter out of the closet — Mendes’ pictures will contain only as much truth and strangeness as they can afford. And with so much money at stake, they can’t afford much.
These movies were inspired by a couple of successful biopics, one of Elton John (Rocketman, 2019) and the other of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018). I watched and enjoyed both, but neither subject transcends pop music. Neither Elton nor Queen — with the exception of their connection to gay culture — is historically important. Those movies have come and gone very happily as exercises in nostalgia, and a way to sell a lot of records, but that’s all.
Anything about The Beatles is inherently higher stakes. The Beatles are inextricably woven into the fabric of the Sixties, a decade that really kicked off, for better and worse, the modern era. This is why the US can’t seem to stop electing baby boomers as president; we are still stuck in the language of the Sixties, the fights of the Sixties, and even the media techniques of the Sixties. When you look at how Donald Trump interacts with his base, and especially how he uses social media — that “I tell you everything, they’re all squares, you can’t trust anybody but me” stance — it’s impossible not to think of John Lennon’s approach to fame and fandom, especially after Yoko.
Getting The Beatles’ story right is a big part of getting The Sixties story right, which in turn is a huge clue to how we’ve gotten to where we are today. Not just the good stuff (less snobbery, acceptance of alternative lifestyles), and the bad stuff (a reflexive distrust of authority, deep cynicism about everything really), but even the baseline conditions we can’t even perceive anymore (youth culture as the only culture, a tendency to mistake media for real life). Contemporary culture is very much the child of the Sixties…which is why four simultaneously released Beatles biopics are being produced in the first place. And why I’m writing about them, too.
Once Upon a Time in Liverpool
Recently I watched Quentin Tarentino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which shows how one can produce content about an epoch-making time and place, without distorting it. Briefly, the movie follows an television actor and his stunt double, as his career becomes progressively more doomed by the changes the Sixties wrought. The movie climaxes with (spoiler alert) the Mansons visiting the actor’s bungalow on Cielo Drive rather than showing up at Sharon Tate’s next door; and rather than being greeted by a bunch of vulnerable hippies ready for the slaughter, the Manson crew is mangled, beaten, and frizzled to death by a flamethrower.
This movie is in no way history. Yet one leaves the film knowing more about Los Angeles in 1969, not less, and because the crowd-pleasing revisionism is bright lined, audiences can enjoy it as a melancholy what-might-have-been, rather than mistake it, even for one second, for what was.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is fiction ending with one real event, changed to make a better movie; now think of an entire life, four of them. How is it possible for these pictures not to be…well, dishonest in the name of box office receipts? And if one cares about the history, how is it possible to see these films as yet more distortion of reality in an era already sickened, maybe mortally so, by its addiction to fantasy? I’m not suggesting that the Beatles movies will change history as blatantly as Tarentino did. They might be subtler, which is much, much worse.
The era in which I live is increasingly confusing and alarming to me; this is one of the sunk costs of getting old. But one of the most alarming facets of our current time is how people will do almost anything to avoid reading history. Mendes’ movies, no matter how wonderful, cannot help but continue our modern mania to have the stories we like replace facts we don’t.
Knowing the facts in this case drives one to a singular conclusion: to be worthy of the real story — what really happened to the real people, and how it changed life for all of us — each film will have to be an achievement roughly on the scale of Citizen Kane. Four times over, movies as brilliant as Kane…which, by the way, flopped at the box office. And, it must be remembered, wasn’t even the true story of William Randolph Hearst—sometimes, for the sake of art, commerce, or both, a clitoris needs to be turned into a sled.
Unfortunately, in the case of Mendes’ movies, we’ll all know it.
Related posts:
Last Recorded Audio of John Lennon, 12/8/80
I’m So Tired: Responsive Notes on the Phenomenon of Beatle Fatigue
Try it, you might like it
“Yesterday,” the film: slight but fun
Los Angeles Beatles fans: Wanna go see a movie?
Ian Leslie: “Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back”
Beatles singles that never were?
Shepard Fairey George Harrison Poster
“Poor old Buddy”
Various musings on Lennon and Addiction
Allen Ginsberg: “Portland Coliseum” (1965)
I’d say you nailed it, Michael. I don’t expect much from any of these movies, because we already have hundreds of hours of the real thing on video, and the real Beatles are just more interesting than any fictional portrayal of them could possibly make them. I mean, the real John Lennon looked like a different person almost every year of his life from 1963 onward — how is any actor supposed to portray that? The real Paul McCartney who lived in the world of 1965 wasn’t just cute and talented (though he was both); he was also a guy who attended plays and hung out with poets and took photographs and listened to Stockhausen records — can any movie capture that? The real Hamburg story is so much more interesting than Backbeat.
The only fictional Beatle movie I remember finding kind of interesting was The Hours and Times, because it wasn’t about the public John Lennon at all, but about who the guy was in private, for a few days of his life, right before the whole Beatlemania phenomenon began. I saw the movie so long ago that I can’t really remember how well it pulled that off, but it strikes me as, at least, a better way to approach the subject than trying to tell the whole story.
Remember what Orson Welles said about the Cole Porter movie? When it was being filmed, he joked: “What will they use for a climax? The only suspense is: will he or won’t he accumulate $10 million?”
Regarding Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”: when I saw Damian Lewis, I KNEW instantly he was Steve McQueen. When I saw Rachel Redleaf, I knew she was Mama Cass. But when I look at the photo above, I don’t see the Beatles. I see maybe Ray Davies and the Kinks.
I HAD THE SAME THOUGHTS! Damian Lewis looks strikingly like McQueen.
Maybe they’ll use cgi to make these fellas look like The Beatles?
I have a sinking feeling about this project for a number of reasons, most of which you touched on, Michael. Most of all I think doing FOUR films is a mistake. That saddles the writers with having to come up with four scripts that will inevitably overlap a lot but also must be distinct and interesting individually. I think they’re going to struggle with the repetition involved in covering the music making and performing and are therefore likely to spend too much time on each Beatle’s personal life, in ways that I don’t expect to be illuminating.
The films about the Beatles that have worked tend to focus on either the earliest years (“Nowhere Boy,” “Backbeat,” “The Hours and Times”) or the years after the breakup (“Two of Us.”) Besides “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!,” and “Yellow Submarine,” we have the “Anthology” vidoes, the Ed Sullivan shows, and generally just so much video footage. I think these films are going to come off as pastiche no matter what.
And that photo does nothing to inspire my confidence. The wigs are bad and the posing looks more like mugging.
Bets on which films will do best? Obviously poor Ringo will come in last, and my money’s on Paul coming out on top (he always outsold the others, he’s still alive and selling out venues all over the world, there’ll be interviews & maybe red carpet stuff, etc etc). Tougher to call between George & John: the kids prefer George, but I think there are enough movie-loving Boomers and Xers out there to tip things in John’s favour. Plus, much as his star may have dimmed, he’s still very much an all-round historical Icon in a way George never was or wanted to be.
Justin, if we’re talking financial success, I think you’re right.
John is just too thorny a character for young people to enjoy; they like their males to be unthreatening, and Lennon simply wasn’t that.
The interesting thing is that George wasn’t either! (Just rewatched the Scorsese doc, so Harrison’s intermittent fury is much in my mind this morning.)
I suspect that the Lennon biopic will beach itself on the shoals of Yoko—-she practically embodies several social media hot-button issues. The transformation of Lennon from a witty truth teller to a despicable wifebeater tracks the rise of social media exactly.
George had nearly as big a gap between who he was and his public persona, but his partner hasn’t been nearly as public about this gap, so fans can comfortably think of George as an uncomplicated religious seeker. That will make for a less divisive movie experience, than the John movie.
I’ve looked around and can’t find the release plans for these four films: I’d suspect that whichever is first to the post will do best financially, because I think audience fatigue will set in.
Good point!
Paul presents a dramatic problem, namely that there’s not much drama in his life after 1969, not much change or external obstacles preventing him from getting what he wants.
Except if what he wants is to work with John again.
If I were involved with this project, I would take note of the recent fascination with John and Paul’s relationship, and really amp up the romance there, making John and Paul into star-crossed lovers, prevented by their era from becoming a couple. *Without ever saying that*, of course. Like that recent book, “John and Paul: A Love Story.”
The online generations are simply obsessed with two things: identity, and conspiracy.
Boomers would hate it, and Xers would too, but it would get young people to the theater, and spur a million tweets…which is the point here: the millennializing of The Fabs, so the heirs can make money for thirty more years.
Boomer here, 71 y.o.
Michael, you nailed it, we’re dropping like flies. My brother is 76, and my partner is 80, but we’ve lost a lot of friends.
You really hit home with your paragraph about how we are programmed to ‘the good stuff’, and ‘the bad stuff’. That’s exactly how I think, and have done all of my life.
I loved ‘Two of Us’ and ‘Nowhere Boy’. I thought the writing and acting was wonderful.
The actors looks were spot on, or at least believable.
Looking at the picture above, it will take some great writing and acting to get me past the fact that they look like anybody but the Beatles.
BTW,
Have you heard the two minute clip of Paul talking about Two of Us’?
I thought he was very honest and believable, but one never knows.https://youtu.be/xoWYMmQLA2A
See how deeply cynical us boomers can be? 🙂
I do not like the looks of this project at all. Not only for the reasons that many of you have stated, but that I cannot get my head around what the above picture is supposed to mean. Three actors who, in the role of the Beatles, are seen giving the finger to the viewers. Seriously?
It is almost as if the writers feel obliged to try to paint a picture for the generations of today that the Beatles were some type of anarchic “show it to the man” type of rebels. No, they were a quartet of gifted, ambitious, creative, and curious musicians and artists. They were no more rebels then are dentists who put on leather and ride around on their Harleys on the weekends. In fact, until Ringo started to occasionally get nasty with people, most of them retained their very English sensibilities and just lived their lives.
If I try to imagine rebels and seriously bad dudes then I think of the Sex Pistols and the punk movement. One only need to read a few paragraphs of the excellent critic Nick Kent to discover how that was a scene that was, dangerous, violent, and apart from any semblance of society. That was not the Beatles.
Second, we know that young people today have a smorgasbord of choices when it comes to music. The “angry artist” shtick became a meme long ago and if we want them to give the Beatles a chance, it is best to offer them examples of their ingenuity and the influences they had that reach even to today. A picture of three badly costumed thespians flipping the bird does no one a favor. In, fact, it probably is a candidate for Cory Doctorow’s list of examples of Entshittification.
Maybe I am wrong and this was just the actors being the twenty or thirty-somethings that they are while standing around a set shooting still photos. I hope so.
I very much agree with them looking as if they were trying to play the Kinks!
I wonder if they selected these actors to attract certain age groups/fans. I have never heard of any of them, but I don’t follow contemporary culture.
Our 40 something children surely know who they are, and have probably seen some/much of their work.
Unquestionably so, @Paul. But this underscores my basic issue with the movies.
Running “The Beatles” like a bunch of IP that can (and must!) be refreshed for each new generation misses something really important: The Beatles are not the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They are history. They were people who did things and didn’t do other things; had opinions; made mistakes. Their real selves and real lives, which we largely know, aren’t something to be remixed or retconned for money.
There is a post in this, surely, but I feel like I spend most of every day thinking/worrying about it. Our culture’s turning away from history — both the study of, and the manufacture of via scholarship — in favor of religion and mythology (which now encompasses everything from pop culture to advertising to conspiracy theories) — seems to be leading us into a very, very bloody and short-sighted era. One that technology may make our last.
Feeding The Beatles — the real people, the real story, the actual provable reality — into the myth-making machine is a symptom of a very misguided age, one that, so far, is simply not intellectually prepared or courageous enough to guide our species. That’s really the opposite of who The Beatles were, and what they stood for. The Sixties were a hair-raising time, full of conflict and species-wide near-misses, and it took all the wisdom we could muster to get through them. In addition to creating amazing music, The Beatles were consistently on the right side of the major issues of the day, and spoke more wisely and clearly than anyone had a right to expect them to.
The real guys were really something else; for that reason alone, we should resist the corporate urge to remix them, as if who they were in their time isn’t interesting enough for the young folks, or something young people won’t relate to. We know the real John Paul George and Ringo, and they were absolutely great. That should be enough to keep them as au courant as they need to be.
Agreed! It makes me almost hope the movies flop. But is that even possible? Good or bad, everyone is going to watch them to find out.