Help! Do we really need four Beatles biopics?
Barry Keoghan leads a “fab four” of actors who have been selected by Sam Mendes for his quartet of Beatles films, which Sony describes as the “first binge-able theatrical experience”.
All four films will be released in April 2028 but the project is already facing criticism of its format and casting, so it’s not clear how many of us will come together to watch it.
A hard day’s night
Do we “really need” four stand-alone Beatles biopics, asks Ed Power in The i Paper? Wondering if all four Beatles are “equally interesting”, he noted that we “have made it to 2025” without “thinking too deeply” about the “inner workings of Ringo Starr’s creative process”, and this might not need “urgent remedying”.
There’ll be “questions about the wisdom” of trying to tell the Beatles’ story from “top to tail”, because the best Beatles adaptations have “zeroed in on specific moments” from their career.
Sony’s description of a “bingeable” theatrical experience has caught the attention, but what this means is “kind of a mystery”, wrote Fran Hoepfner on Vulture. Are we “supposed to sit through them all back-to-back like people do for ‘The Lord of the Rings'”?
It could be a hard day’s night to watch all four films in a row, but the “at-home culture of binge-viewing” on streaming platforms means box-office receipts at UK cinemas are 22% below 2019 levels, said a leader in The Times, so “perhaps if cinema can’t beat the culture of bingeing”, it should instead “join it”.
No, no, no
The castings of Keoghan, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Harris Dickinson have caused a lot of heat, with some Beatles fans “angry” that the filmmakers went with “stereotypically ‘hot'” and famous actors rather than casting “unknown” actors who resemble the band members, said Clare Donaldson on The Daily Beast.
It “would have been wonderful” to see “some unknowns in the lead roles”, agreed Ben Lawrence in The Telegraph, so casting directors should have been “scouring local theatres” in search of “rough-hewn talent” to bring “famous Liverpudlian grit and humour” to the roles.
One person gently weeping at not being involved is Beatles biographer Philip Norman. In the Daily Mail, he said that he wrote to Sony “offering my help” but an assistant at the company “turned down my offer”, because “the great director” would “rather not be confused by facts” nor, “heaven forbid, pay someone for enlightening him”.
With a long and winding road of three years to go before the films hit our screens, might people calm down? It’s “not uncommon” for people who were “angry” over a casting announcement to “change their mind later”, said Donaldson, but the “attention and criticism” will probably “intensify” in the run-up to the release of the biopics.
