The Beatles broke up in 1970 but – as far as the film industry is concerned – they are more current than ever, with a flood of Beatles-related films in cinemas and on streaming platforms. The band’s final film Let It Be was restored and released on Disney+ in May; Midas Man, a biopic of their manager Brian Epstein is to be released in October; and One Hand Clapping, long-lost footage of Paul McCartney in the studio in the early 70s with Wings will get an airing in cinemas across the world starting next week. Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville is readying another McCartney documentary, Man on the Run, about his post-Beatles career. And on the horizon is Sam Mendes’ mammoth Beatles tetralogy – one film each for John Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – planned for release in 2027.
The reasoning behind Beatles-related films is not hard to discern. Music writer and broadcaster Peter Paphides says: “For me, it’s like the greatest story ever told. We all know the story now. We know what the narrative arc is. We know it has everything in it. We know it has friendship, love, incredible music. The whole human condition is just encased in the story of the Beatles.”
Paphides identifies the Anthology TV series and accompanying album release in the mid-90s as the point when interest in the Beatles began to mushroom. “All of a sudden, for younger people who might have been into the emerging British guitar music, they could be into them almost like they were a current band. At the same time, you had their parents’ generation who never stopped loving them.” The steady stream of documentaries and features that followed – from the Sam Taylor Wood-directed Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy in 2009, to Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World in 2011, to the Richard Curtis/Danny Boyle fantasia Yesterday in 2019 – underscored the strength of the band’s appeal to film audiences decades on. These build on the five feature films – A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Yellow Submarine, Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be – along with the various promos, videos and tour documentaries that the Beatles made during their active existence to create a mammoth archive of Beatles and Beatles-adjacent moving-image product.
Paphides says that this endless stream of films is part of a strategy by Apple Corps, the corporate entity that controls Beatles-related business. “What I notice in the way Apple are doing things these days is there’s a real sort of consciousness that you just keep having to put new projects out there, new releases, new films. There always has to be something on the go which will sort of keep the Beatles name right up there.”
Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour restoration of the footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the Let It Be sessions in 1969, is a case in point; in the run-up to Lindsay-Hogg’s original film’s 50th anniversary in 2020, Apple asked Jackson to examine the raw footage sitting in its archive, and a combination of the pandemic and the director’s enthusiasm for what he found turned the project into arguably the TV event of the year.
Such is the power of the Beatles brand that peripheral figures can claim a share of the attention; Paphides points out that “there are so many interesting characters in the Beatles story, and you can carve out little plots, little arcs, within the overall story, and really hone in on them”. Midas Man, a biopic of the band’s manager Brian Epstein, is the latest to emerge, and takes in Epstein’s journey from running the record department at his family store in Liverpool to becoming a entertainment-industry mogul with a string of stars under contract.
Midas Man is produced by Trevor Beattie, a renowned advertising executive, for whom the Epstein project has been years in the making. “I’m aware that this film is going to be viewed through a microscope because everything Beatles-related is. However much I say this is not a Beatles film, it’s about Brian, I know that people are still going to look at it through that microscope. And that’s OK, you have to accept that.”
A key point for any Beatles film is the band’s music, and Midas Man doesn’t have original Beatles recordings, or any Lennon-McCartney compositions; because of the story’s chronology, it can use the standards, such as Besame Mucho, that the band regularly played in the early part of their career. Beattie says they also benefited from the co-operation of the late Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers) as well as Freda Kelly, Epstein’s secretary and president of the Beatles fan club (and who had her own documentary, Good Ol’ Freda, in 2013). “Unlike Brian’s family, she’s very much still with us, and she really enabled us to get it right.”
The question of accuracy, and whether it is ever possible in the swirl of myth and counter-myth in the Beatles story, crops up time and again. For Beattie, the myth-making goes right back to the start of their film career, to their 1964 picture A Hard Day’s Night. “The most important thing that Hard Day’s Night did was to create four caricatures of the Beatles – and guess what, those caricatures stuck for the rest of their lives.” Paphides agrees: “Maybe in the long term that’s kind of all that matters. Everyone is doomed or sort of fated to become a fictional character of one kind or another, they start off real and then over the years become fictionalised versions of themselves.”
But whether it’s Let It Be, One Hand Clapping or Midas Man, in the end it all comes down to the music. Beattie says: “In the 1960s, it was kids screaming over the songs. And here we are, half a century later, studying them like Bach or Shakespeare. But they are still the same songs.”
• Paul McCartney and Wings – One Hand Clapping is out on 26 September in cinemas worldwide, and Midas Man is on Prime Video on 30 October.
