The Beatles never all walked the Croisette together, but Cannes has kept crossing their story. Across different years, all four members turned up on the famed strip at one point or another, and the band’s film life now sits back in the spotlight as Sam Mendes prepares The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event for release in April 2028.
That latest project arrives with a long paper trail behind it. The group launched Beatlemania with Love Me Do in the tail end of 1963, then signed a three-picture deal with United Artists in the summer of that year. They even considered an offer to play a pop group in The Yellow Teddy Bears before passing. By March 1964, filming had begun on A Hard Day’s Night, Richard Lester’s brisk black-and-white portrait of four members on the move, and the shoot lasted less than two months.
The film reached its London premiere on July 6th, 1964, after a rapid production that helped fix the band’s screen image almost as firmly as their music did. Paul McCartney later summed up the speed of those decisions with a simple recollection of the meeting with Brian Epstein: “We said to Brian, ‘Yeah, OK, great!’”
A Hard Day’s Night was released in the summer of 1964, less than a year before Help!, which sent Ringo Starr into one of the band’s more comic set pieces when a fan mailed him a ring. The Beatles kept moving through cinema after that. Magical Mystery Tour arrived in 1967, Yellow Submarine in 1968 and Let It Be in 1970. Peter Jackson later returned to the master tapes for his 2021 mini-series Get Back, reopening the archive again for a new generation.
The Cannes connection is part of a wider rock-and-film history at the festival, where other acts such as The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd and U2 have also appeared over the years. But the Beatles’ case is unusual: they were never there all at once, yet their presence is threaded through the festival’s memory anyway. Mendes’ 2028 project now pushes that legacy forward, and it does so by returning the band to the screen, where their story has always seemed to travel best.
