The China Mail - Sam Mendes to launch four 'Beatles' movies in same month

The "four-film cinematic event," hitting theaters in April 2028, will each focus on a different member of the legendary British pop quartet, with Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.

"Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys. They intersect in different ways -- sometimes overlapping, sometimes not," Mendes told the CinemaCon movie theater convention in Las Vegas.

"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."

Filming is about to begin, and is expected to take more than a year, said Mendes. The exact order in which the movies will be released has not yet been revealed.

"I'd been trying to make a film about the Beatles for years, but I had temporarily given up," explained "American Beauty" Oscar-winner Mendes.

"I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV mini-series just somehow didn't feel right."

The announcement came at the start of the CinemaCon trade convention, where movie theater owners gather annually in Las Vegas to hear Hollywood studios' plans for the coming months and years.

While 2025 had been widely touted as the year that the movie industry would bounce back, the box office has so far endured a terrible start, reeling from high-profile flops like Disney's live-action "Snow White" and sci-fi "Mickey 17."

The $1.3 billion taken in North America receipts so far is seven percent below an already lean Q1 2024, which was itself derailed by the previous year's massive Hollywood strikes.

All this is roiling an industry that has never fully returned to pre-pandemic profit levels, and had informally adopted the motto "Survive till '25."

So CinemaCon at the Caesars Palace casino is a key chance for Hollywood to present upcoming films to theater owners -- and, hopefully, inspire a bit of confidence that the good times are coming back.

- Spidey and Bond? -

The event kicked off Monday night with a presentation from Sony Pictures.

As well as sharing news about Mendes' "Beatles" movies, the studio unveiled information about its wildly popular "Spider-Man" films.

A new live-action film starring Tom Holland, "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," was confirmed for July 2026, while animated movie "Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse" received a June 2027 release date.

The studio also teased this summer's "28 Years Later," a long-in-development apocalyptic horror sequel from Danny Boyle, starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes.

Boyle nodded to speculation about the next actor to play James Bond by joking that Taylor-Johnson "may or may not be the next Bond" -- and how Fiennes "probably should have been."

Later in the week at CinemaCon, Amazon MGM will give a major presentation, just days after unveiling new producers for the 007 franchise it spent billions of dollars acquiring.

Warner Bros. will be desperate to recover from flops like "Mickey 17" and "The Alto Knights" -- a Robert De Niro film that took just $5 million worldwide on its recent opening weekend, despite having cost $45 million to make.

The studio has a mouth-watering lineup, including Leonardo DiCaprio film "One Battle After Another," and a major new "Superman" film that it hopes can revitalize its entire flagging DC superhero franchise.

In a near-annual tradition, Paramount will showcase its latest "Mission: Impossible" film, prompting the inevitable rumors of a Tom Cruise appearance on the stage of the casino's giant auditorium.

Other studios due to present this week include Universal Pictures, with its latest "Jurassic World" and "Wicked" sequels, and Lionsgate, home of Keanu Reeves' many "John Wick" movies.

Disney, with an ever-growing roster of Marvel superheroes and a new "Avatar" sequel due in December, will wrap up the event on Thursday night.

L.Kwan--ThChM