The Beatles Are Each Getting Their Own Biopic From James Bond Director
It feels like every great band or musician has gotten the biopic treatment except for one very noticeable exception: The Beatles.
Music history’s most successful rock group of all time has had plenty of documentaries and even the occasional cameo, but they haven’t scored their own feature-length movie yet. Director Sam Mendes, the filmmaker behind 1917, American Beauty, and several of the Daniel Craig James Bond movies, is finally giving The Beatles the biopic they deserve.
Four Seperate Biopics
Sam Mendes is making plans to film four separate Beatles biopic movies. Each one will tell the story behind each of The Beatles, including Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. All four stories will line up to intersect in 1970 when The Beatles broke up and went their separate ways.
Complete Access To The Beatles History
Mendes has already cleared the biggest hurdles to getting the movies made. He’s got permission from Lennon and Harrison’s families to tell their stories, and he has the right to access The Beatles’ entire catalog of iconic music. Sony Pictures Entertainment is footing the bill for the films and plans to distribute them starting in 2027.
A New Wave Of Musical Biopics
Music biopics are starting to ramp up again at the box office with movies like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla about the life of Elvis’ wife Priscilla Presley taking up real estate on the movie marque. Other recent musical biopics include Maestro, based on the life of Leonard Bernstein, starring Bradley Cooper, and the new Bob Marley biopic that hit theaters already, Bob Marley: One Love. Having four biopics of The Beatles to look forward to more than makes up for the time it takes to wait for them.
Peter Jackson’s Documentary
Of course, if you’re the impatient type, you can always take another look at director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, streaming on Disney+. Jackson’s three-part series showed never-before-seen footage of the group in 1969 trying to mount one last comeback for their fans before their inevitable breakup in 1970. The documentary showed the group trying to come up with a new collection of songs and holding nothing back as they stumble to make something happen for one last run.
More Biopics Thanks To Oppenheimer?
Biopics are bound to be a big trend again, and not just ones about musical legends like The Beatles. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the summer hit about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the construction of the atomic bomb, was one of the biggest hits of 2023, and it seems destined to score a lot of gold at this year’s Oscars. Oppenheimer has the most Academy Award nominations of any other film this year, including one for Best Picture.
Happy For Ringo
It’s still a shame that Oppenheimer didn’t get a nod for Best Visual Effects, and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania did, but it’s destined to pick up statues in a lot of other categories instead. Mendes’ biopics about The Beatles could very easily be on the Academy Awards stage.
