LOS ANGELES — Sony Pictures has promised four Beatles films for April 2028 and has not said publicly how they will reach cinemas. People familiar with the plans are now filling that silence: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony and director Sam Mendes have weighed opening all four films on one day, reporting their box-office takings as a single combined figure, and selling a four-ticket bundle.
Sony had no comment, and the sources stressed that the ideas remain fluid and could change. None of it is confirmed.
The report landed three days after the project’s own producer offered a softer public version. Pippa Harris, Mendes’ partner at Neal Street Productions, told the BFI London Film Festival’s Industry Forum on Monday that audiences might see the films “within the same month,” perhaps “one a week,” and that this “doesn’t necessarily mean” anyone would watch all four on one day, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the session. Harris, who had come from set for an hour, said the shoot was on day 180.
She was describing viewing habits, not an opening date, so her remarks and the exclusive can both be true. Official language is thinner. The band’s official site, which hosts Sony’s cast announcements, says only that the studio will “finance and distribute worldwide with full theatrical windows in April 2028”: a month, no day, no order.
The pooled gross is the most unusual idea. The Hollywood Reporter reported that a combined tally would spare the films a public ranking of the four Beatles, a sensitive point because Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving members, are involved, having given feedback on scripts and met the actors. The four-ticket bundle would presumably require cinema chains to adopt an unusual ticketing structure, and the trade said it was not clear how that would work.
Sony film chief Tom Rothman told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that the idea’s boldness had to be matched “with a bold release strategy.” Pooling the grosses would break with the habit of scoring titles one at a time, as Sony’s Resident Evil reboot was in September, when a franchise-record opening belonged to a single film.
What no one has said on the record is whether the cinema chains have been asked, or whether four separate numbers would exist anywhere if the public one is a single figure.
