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The award-winning British writers Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne will pen Sam Mendes’ four Beatles films, it has been reported.
The four biopics, focusing on each member of the fab four, will be released in cinemas in April 2028 – with Paul Mescal playing Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon, Barry Keoghan playing Ringo Star, and Joseph Quinn playing George Harrison.
Butterworth is the Olivier and Tony award-winning playwright behind The Ferryman and The Hills of California, both of which were directed by Mendes. He found acclaim with his play Jerusalem, which has been described as “the greatest British play of the 21st century”.
For screen, Butterworth has previously written the scripts for James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari, the James Bond film Spectre, the Whitey Bulger crime drama Black Mass, and the Indiana Jones franchise film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Straughan most recently won an Oscar for his screenplay for Edward Berger’s papal thriller Conclave. He also won a Bafta for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which he wrote with his late wife Bridget O’Connor.
For television, Straughan adapted Hilary Mantel’s bestselling novel Wolf Hall, which won a Bafta for best drama series, and wrote its sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.
Meanwhile, Thorne has garnered widespread acclaim for his recent hit series Adolescence, which he created with Stephen Graham. For stage, he has written the Olivier and Tony award-winning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and most recently The Motive and the Cue, which was directed by Mendes.
Thorne’s other TV credits include the This Is England miniseries, which he co-wrote with director Shane Meadows; the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s hit children’s novels His Dark Materials; and Toxic Town, the story of three mothers involved in the Corby toxic waste case.
He has also written the screenplay for films including the Enola Holmes films, The Swimmers and the forthcoming sequel to Tron: Legacy, titled Tron: Ares.
It is unknown if each writer will be writing their own film or will be collaborating on all four films.
Mendes conceived and will direct the films, which mark the first time Apple, the Beatles’ record company, and the two living band members, McCartney and Starr, have granted the rights to their stories for the big screen.
“The Beatles changed my understanding of music,” Mendes recently told an audience at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas. “I’ve been trying to make a movie about them for years.”
The Oscar-winning director said the story was “too big for one film”, and did not work as a TV series, adding: “Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.”
According to Mendes, Tom Rothman, the boss of Sony, which is producing the movies, called them “the first bingeable theatrical experience”.
But there have already been some ripples of backlash to the casting of four non-scouse actors – two of them Irish – as the famous sons of Liverpool.
