It’s official: Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and Mia McKenna-Bruce will play the wives in Sam Mendes’ “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” (via Variety).
They will, respectively, be playing Linda McCartney (Ronan), Yoko Ono (Sawai), Pattie Boyd (Wood) and Maureen Starkey (McKenna-Bruce), who each married a Beatle at the height of the band’s fame and success.
After months of rehearsal, Sam Mendes is supposed to — finally — start production on his four Beatles movies next month. The films are set to be shot consecutively, each with a different screenwriter in a “Rashomon”-style narrative. The logistics of this project are just as fascinating as the films themselves.
We already know the main cast: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon.
The Beatles films from Mendes, all set for theatrical release in April 2028, represent a bold experiment in event-style filmmaking. Mendes will direct, working from scripts by Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan, and Jack Thorne, though it remains unclear which writer is handling which project. There’s a writer missing for the fourth film, rumored to be Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”).
The films are expected to have a 15-month shoot. Puck’s Matt Belloni recently reported that the movies are “said to be costing about $100M each.” That’s $400M+ in total — a price tag that rivals the biggest studio bets of the past decade. Sony Pictures head Tom Rothman, however, is betting big on Mendes.
Greig Fraser, who stepped away from Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three” and Matt Reeves’ “The Batman: Part Two,” will serve as cinematographer on “Beatles.”
I actually find that number optimistic. Tickets for “Digger” go on sale next Tuesday, and presales will give us a better picture of how bad it’s looking.