“The Beatles changed my understanding of music,” the film director Sam Mendes told an audience at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas on Monday. “I’ve been trying to make a movie about them for years.”
And it seems the long and winding road will reach its destination in April 2028, as the James Bond and American Beauty director confirmed four biopics of the Fab Four – one for each member.
Mendes has enlisted Hollywood favourites to star as what he described as “the most significant band of all time”: Paul Mescal will play Paul McCartney; Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon; Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr; and Joseph Quinn will play George Harrison.
The Oscar-winner said the story was “too big for one film”, and did not work as a TV series, adding: “We’re not just making one film about the Beatles – we’re making four.
“Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.”
According to Mendes, Tom Rothman, the boss of Sony, which is producing the movies, called them “the first binge-able theatrical experience”.
It marks the first time Apple, the Beatles’ record company, and the two living band members, McCartney and Starr, have granted the rights to their stories for the big screen.
In an interview with People magazine, 84-year-old Starr said he was “excited to see what [Mendes] does with” the “madness of making four movies at the same time … there’ll be Beatles in mine around when I joined, and there’ll be Beatles in Paul’s. We’ll all be there.”
The stars of The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event were revealed on stage, all dressed in black, at the annual industry event for Hollywood.
Dickinson, Keoghan, Mescal and Quinn then recited from the Beatles’ song Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: “It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill, you’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us.”
“There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation,” Mendes told the audience, adding: “I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore and I think we found a way to do that.”
Rumours had swirled for months about who would play the band members, especially after the Gladiator II director, Ridley Scott, appeared to accidentally reveal Mescal had been cast as McCartney back in December. Dickinson, too, dodged speculation that he would play Lennon, telling an interviewer it would be a “brilliant opportunity”.
But there are already ripples of backlash to the casting of four non-scouse actors – two of them Irish – as the famous sons of Liverpool.
“Thank goodness none of them are already known to have a famously terrible scouse accent, amirite?!” wrote Amy-Leigh Shaw on Bluesky, referring to Keoghan’s on/off Liverpool twang in the film Saltburn.
Aiden Byrne said the Beatles were an incredible band but “unless these films have some startling new angle then all they’re gonna do is make everyone realise that doing scouse accents properly is hard”.
The Guardian’s own film critic, Peter Bradshaw, got stuck in, writing that the absence of actors from Merseyside “could be an issue”.
Criticism too was levelled at the actors’ ages – Mescal is 29, playing a character who was 27 when the band broke up – and their physiques, with one commenter, Isaac Butler, writing: “Finally we will get to see four movies that ask the question: ‘What if the Beatles had six pack abs?’”
