‘The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event’ Announces Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, Barry Keoghan, Harris Dickinson as the Fab Four with April 2028 Release Date
After months of speculation, Sony Pictures officially confirmed the cast of The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, directed by Sam Mendes at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas. Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon, Paul Mescal will play Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn will play George Harrison. But here’s the twist, all four films will be in theaters in April 2028 at the same time.
The films’ official logline reads: “Each man has his own story, but together they are legendary.” Mendes promised that the multi-part biopic, officially titled The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, will be the “first binge-able theatrical experience.” He and Sony Pictures didn’t specify if the films will be released all at once or one per week over the course of a month.
“We need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” Mendes told the room full of the newly named Cinema United theater owners on Monday at Sony’s presentation. The Oscar-winning director (American Beauty) said he had dreamed of bringing the Fab Four to screens for years but didn’t want to make a miniseries and he worried that “the story was too huge to fit into a single movie.” So instead, he came up with a gamble to tell the story of “the greatest band in history” by telling it from the perspective of each of its members, through four separate but intertwined stories and perspectives, to try to capture their improbable journey of the lads from Liverpool that still captures our attention today.
The film is also the first narrative feature to be granted music rights to the Beatles’ extensive catalog of hits, which were once majority owned by the late Michael Jackson.
Mendes said that principal photography on the four films will take a full year. Tom Rothman, the Sony Pictures chief who oversaw production on James Cameron’s Oscar-winning blockbuster sci-fi epic Avatar back when he was at Fox, joked that the four-part epic from Mendes was giving him “‘Avatar’ flashbacks.”
Harris Dickinson broke through in 2017’s Beach Rats before appearing in the 2022 Palme d’Or winner and Best Picture Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness and most recently with Nicole Kidman in 2024’s Babygirl. Paul Mescal earned an Emmy nomination for his first work in television (2020’s Normal People) and Oscar nomination for his first lead role in a film (2022’s Aftersun). He was most recently in Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to the 2000 Best Picture Oscar winner and later this year will be seen in The History of Sound and Hamnet. Barry Koeghan was most recently in Saltburn and Bird and on the limited series Masters of Air. Joseph Quinn broke out as rocker Eddie Munson on Stranger Things before landing high profile gigs in A Quiet Place: Day One, Gladiator II opposite Mescal and the upcoming Fantastic Four film for Marvel.
Mendes directs and co-produces with Pippa Harris, Julie Pastor, and Alexandra Derbyshire.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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