Sam Mendes is making a film about each of the Beatles

Not one, not two, not three, but four. That’s how many Beatles-centric films we’re getting from director Sam Mendes, the man behind greats like American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, and 1917. As well as telling the story of the band in a broader sense, each member will be granted a film honing in on their unique perspective. While not much is known about the untitled project yet, the accompanying press release described the film series as “culturally seismic”, “daring”, and “large-scale”, which is music to our ears considering the recent decline of the increasingly formulaic genre.

Considering that they’re, well, The Beatles, it might come as a surprise that they haven’t been given the silver screen treatment by a prominent director until now. To be fair, there has been a whole lot of Beatles-adjacent media coming out of Hollywood (and beyond — we love a made-for-TV film about the iconic band). Over the years, everyone from Jared Harris to Christopher Eccleston has had a pop at playing one of them, and the band even made an appearance in an ITV series about Cilla Black. Of the more memorable entries into the genre, there’s Nowhere Boy, which starred Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Lennon, and Chapter 27, in which Jared Leto played Mark Chapman, who assassinated Lennon.

If all goes well, the four Beatles flicks will come out in 2027, a whole three years down the line. With that in mind, an age old question emerges: what Beatles-centric media can we pour over in the meantime? For us, it’s got to be that five minute scene from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which we’ve linked above for your viewing pleasure. Paul Rudd as John Lennon, Jack Black as Paul McCartney, Justin Long as George Harrison, and Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr… No notes.