Beatles Biopic Cast Draws Unflattering Comparisons to ‘Walk Hard’
As Hollywood continues to greenlight stories about iconic musicians — minus any unsavory details that could jeopardize acquiring the music rights — one high-profile musical biopic has proven to be surprisingly controversial, despite the fact that filming hasn’t even started yet.
It was recently announced that director Sam Mendes will be helming a film project about The Beatles. But in order to fully honor the legendary group (and boost ticket sales), he’s making four full-length movies, each focusing on one of the four band members: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. And presumably Asylum will throw together a straight-to-DVD movie about Pete Best.
Mendes talked about the project at CinemaCon this week revealing that the four movies will be released at the same time, in what studio executives are calling the “first binge-able theatrical experience.” Hopefully the inevitable collectible Beatles popcorn buckets will come with free caffeine pills.
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Mendes also introduced the stars of his epic multi-film biopic: Paul Mescal as Paul, Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn as George, Barry Keoghan as Ringo and Harris Dickinson as John. But unfortunately for Beatles fans, they look absolutely nothing like The Beatles.
In addition to the fact that the actors don’t physically resemble their real-life counterparts, a lot of people have pointed out that they’re just too old to play The Beatles. Three of the four actors are already older than the Beatles they’re playing were when the band broke up in 1970.
As photos of the cast circulated throughout the internet, the project soon drew comparisons to another movie that featured cinematic representations of The Beatles: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The cult music biopic parody featured a memorable scene in which Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman portray comically unconvincing versions of the Fab Four.
Some folks on social media suggested that this farcical iteration of The Beatles actually looked better than the cast of the official biopic.
Others suggested that the Mendes project was unnecessary, because there’s no way it would ever top Walk Hard.
This isn’t the first time that a highly anticipated music biopic has reminded people of Walk Hard. The trailer for last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown seemed very Dewey Cox-like. And while that movie was mostly well-received, even some of the positive reviews conceded that it was not so dissimilar from Walk Hard.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Beatles movie, which doesn’t hit theaters until 2028, will opt to have the group constantly referring to each other by their full names and reminding audiences that they’re The Beatles.
