Behind Sony’s Four-Movie Beatles Bet

Days after Paramount’s Bob Marley: One Love overperformed in its opening weekend at the box office, Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman stole a bit of the spotlight Feb. 20 in unveiling not one but four intersecting feature films from Sam Mendes about The Beatles, each focusing on one member of the Fab Four: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

“You have to match the boldness of the idea with a bold release strategy,” Rothman tells The Hollywood Reporter about the project that earned the Oscar-winning director a coveted signoff from the group’s selective label Apple Corps. “There hasn’t been an enterprise like this before, and you can’t think about it in traditional releasing terms.”

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Sony hopes the films, which don’t yet have writers on board, will begin shooting in the U.K. in mid-2025 to make the planned 2027 release for all four titles, with the studio expecting to shoot them together. The studio won’t have a sense of the films’ budget until scripts are written, but this is likely a large-scale undertaking, given that there are four separate period films, and Mendes was aligned with Sony on theatrical being essential for the project.

That The Beatles’ story is hitting the big screen at all is enough to return smiles to fans’ faces, as the group has never licensed their music for a scripted biopic. (Beatles songs were the centerpiece of theatrical films like 2019’s Danny Boyle-directed Yesterday, which raked in $154 million, and the 2007 Julie Taymor musical Across the Universe, which grossed $29 million.) Biographical projects previously centering on the group’s origins have included such indie fare as 1994’s Backbeat, focusing on the band’s pre-fame era while performing in Hamburg, Germany, and 2009’s Nowhere Boy, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a teenage Lennon.

Author Bob Spitz says that The Beatles, his best-selling 2005 nonfiction book, has been optioned six times but has not made it to screen, adding that his team is connecting with the filmmakers in the hope that his copious interviews will inform the scripts. “Everybody has heard the legend of The Beatles, but their individual life stories are powerful and little-known,” says Spitz. “Sam’s idea is a great project, and I wish I had thought of it.”

Attorney James Sammataro — a partner at Pryor Cashman, which represents labels including Sony Music — refers to The Beatles and Michael Jackson as “the two Holy Grails of music biopics” because of their elusiveness and the expense of music rights involved for filmmakers. Lionsgate’s Jackson film Michael, starring the superstar’s nephew Jaafar Jackson, comes out next year. (Sony Music acquired rights to most Beatles songs from Jackson’s estate in 2016.) “Historically for artists, there wasn’t a lot of upside in biopics,” Sammataro says, referring to the movies’ impact on song sales. “The more recent move toward biopics is ancillary to an overall changing viewpoint about monetizing music, which is: the more exposure, the better.”

He also notes that access to song catalogs increasingly comes with creative involvement from the artists or their estates. This includes Dr. Dre and Ice Cube serving as producers of Straight Outta Compton, which told the story of their rap group N.W.A, and Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor executive producing Bohemian Rhapsody. With this trend brings discussion over sanitization of less savory elements to the narratives.

“Ziggy Marley, Bob’s son, is a producer of Bob Marley: One Love, which follows several failed attempts by big-name directors, Martin Scorsese included, to acquire permission from the Marley estate to use Bob’s music,” Sammataro says. “One critic slammed the film’s ‘Hallmark Channel’ presentation of Bob, noting that ‘there’s hardly a relative without an associate producer credit.'”

Despite debate over some of its factual elements, insiders point to 20th Century Fox’s Bohemian Rhapsody as having helped reignite the genre. Bryan Singer’s 2018 feature about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury collected $903 million globally and won four Oscars, including best actor for star Rami Malek. Other high-profile music biopics since then have included Rocketman (2019), starring Taron Egerton as Elton John; Elvis (2022), featuring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley; and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (2022), led by Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston.

“It’s a perennial genre,” Rothman says. “Pictures with strong musical elements have always been significant and are even more so now in the theatrical world because that makes it a communal experience.”

While The Beatles, as the biggest-selling music act of all time, per the RIAA, have legions of devoted fans, motivating today’s audiences to leave the couch for four interconnected films of any type could be a tough task.

Still, an exhibition source suggests such films are better suited for streaming and compares the all-in gamble to Kevin Costner’s Horizon saga, with Warner Bros. intending to release the first two Western films theatrically this year before following with two more. Says the individual about the plan for a quartet of Beatles movies: “It’s an audacious play for a subset of fans.”

Other theater chains feel that such concerns are nothing to get hung about. “The Beatles are one of the most iconic music groups of all time, with a scale that is certainly fitting for the big screen,” says Sean Gamble, Cinemark president and CEO. “There has been considerable proven theatrical success of this type of content that combines music and biopic genres, and we are thrilled at the prospect of showcasing these films in our theaters.”

Indeed, Rothman believes big swings are what the industry needs to help get its feet back on the ground. “Much of what we struggle with in our business right now is familiarity,” the Sony Pictures chief says. “How often do you get an approach that is entirely original?”

James Hibberd contributed to this report.

A version of this story appeared in the Feb. 28 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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