CinemaCon 2025 delivered a surprise with the official announcement of Sam Mendes’ four-part Beatles biopic project. The Oscar-winning director confirmed that four individual films, each centered on a different member of the Fab Four, will be released in April 2028, one of the most ambitious scheduling experiments in film history. Alongside the announcement came the reveal of the core cast: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. The project, years in development, now has both its faces and its framework.
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Mendes, known for directing 1917 and Skyfall, took to the CinemaCon stage to defend his unconventional format. “We need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” he told attendees, positioning the Beatles films not only as biopics but as a collective theatrical moment. Instead of offering a single, consolidated story of the Beatles, Mendes will dive into four parallel narratives, each film told from a different member’s perspective. The idea has already drawn comparisons to the Avengers franchise, but the aim here is intimacy, not spectacle.
Each actor brings recent blockbuster pedigree to the table. Mescal has just followed up Aftersun with Gladiator II, while Quinn, also part of Gladiator II, is set to appear as Johnny Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Keoghan’s intense screen presence is well documented, and Dickinson has steadily built a reputation with complex leading roles. Their casting not only reflects current Hollywood momentum but hints at the tonal variance Mendes likely wants to explore within each Beatles storyline.
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The approach opens the door to a more nuanced retelling of the Beatles saga. Rather than rehashing familiar territory, the format allows room for subjective experience: Lennon’s political awakening and turbulent relationship with Yoko Ono, Harrison’s frustration over his sidelined songwriting, McCartney’s creative clashes with Lennon, and Starr’s quiet withdrawal from the group at one point in their career. Mendes isn’t just telling a story of a band, he’s dissecting four distinct legacies shaped by unity and tension.
While it’s likely each Beatle will appear across the films, the structure allows Mendes to examine events from unique angles, a concept reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which famously depicted a single event from multiple viewpoints. With its bold casting and even bolder release plan, the project isn’t just banking on Beatlemania, it’s reimagining what a legacy film can be. All eyes now turn to April 2028, when audiences will have the rare choice of which Beatle’s story they want to step into first.
