This Week in Gossip #15

The Beatles biopics are coming, Kristen Stewart straps up, and Vanity Fair releases another Hollywood issue.

1. Wait, HOW Many Beatles Biopics Are We Getting?

It’s been over 60 years since The Beatles made their first hit, broke the mould for musical excellence,  and changed the world. Every now and then, you’ll hear some smarmy contrarian claim that the band is overrated. These people are wrong and should be dismissed immediately. Plenty of films have been made about the Fab Four over the decades, from documentaries like Peter Jackson’s Get Back to parodies like The Rutles. There are biopics too, usually of solo members like John Lennon, but it's kind of a surprise that there hasn’t been just a full-on biopic of the band during its heyday. We live in the era of the biopic, sadly (the new Bob Marley one is crap, by the way), so this was inevitable. What wasn’t was the announcement that we’re getting four of them at once.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo will each be the subject of a different upcoming film, all directed by Sam Mendes. They will intersect to “tell the astonishing story of the greatest band in history,” leading up to their 1970 breakup, according to a press release (via Variety.) The surviving members and the estates of the late ones have granted full life story and music rights to this gargantuan project. Sony is financing and distributing them, and all four will be released theatrically in 2027.

This is certainly ambitious, and there are so many ways you could experiment with this form. Is one member’s film more comedic than the others? Do they stylistically vary depending on their changing musical inspirations (and drug use)? Will it go full Rashomon? If any band deserves to buck the trend of the biopic formula, it’s the Beatles. But will they be allowed to do so? Will Starr and McCartney veto certain moments that could make them look bad? Will John Lennon’s estate do the same for, say, the ways he was violent towards his first wife? Will Sony want these movies to take risks? This isn’t a genre known for taking the less worn track. They want to sell tickets and records. Granted, the Beatles will never stop selling albums – again, one of the greatest bands EVER – but that didn’t stop Queen from turning their story into a morally reprehensible hack-show. I would love this project to be similar to something like Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, but I don’t know if Mendes has that in him. At the very least, I hope Ringo’s movie is chipper.

2. What’s Going On With Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s First Film Since Parasite?

Bong Joon-ho made history in 2019 with Parasite, the Korean thriller that became a breakout hit with English-language audiences and took home the Best Picture Oscar. It was the first film not in English to win that award, and Bong also won Best Director, beating the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino (and also Todd Phillips, it was a weird season.) There’s always a lot of hype for an Oscar winner’s follow-up to that victorious title, and tons of us were eager to see Mickey 17 this year, Bong’s latest venture into sci-fi following Okja and Snowpiercer.

This one also sounded fascinating. Adapted from a recent novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 is centred on Robert Pattinson's eponymous character, a disposable clone employee sent to colonize an ice planet. When one dies, they bring in an identical replacement. But this latest Mickey doesn't want to be replaced. The cast also includes Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. This seemed like it would be a solid sell, especially if Warner Bros., the distributor, could get it a festival release at Cannes, where Parasite won the Palme d'Or.

That's not happening. The film was initially scheduled for March 29 of this year, before Warner Bros. removed it from the calendar. It's now been rescheduled from January 31, 2025, which doesn't bode well. January is the dump month, remember. Sources told Variety that "the decision was made to allow more time to finish the project, which had been affected due to last year’s strikes and other various production shifts." The decision was also a way to allow the movie "to open in IMAX, which wouldn’t have been possible any earlier because all those dates were previously committed to other titles." This would also put it in line with a Lunar New Year release, which is crucial for Asian territories, and this is a major Korean director, after all.

When a major movie is pulled from the schedule mere weeks before its release, it sends up red flags. It often means the film is bad. But let’s be fair here. The Hot Strike Summer did put a number on the entire system, and a spacey sci-fi is a movie that needs a lot of careful CGI work (and Bong’s films tend to have great VFX, as the eponymous Okja can attest to.) Plus every decision Warner Bros. makes these days is tainted with the Zaslav of it all. Is this a decision made with Bong’s best interests at heart or is that a*sehole just being dumb again? At least he hasn’t deleted it (fingers crossed that doesn’t happen, oh dear lord, don’t let me have jinxed it.) This decision has also just given Mickey 17 the stench of failure, regardless of its end quality. You can’t stick a major movie in January and think people won’t question how good it actually is. And it makes Warner Bros. – AGAIN – seem like they have no idea what they’re doing. How do you fumble the follow-up to a movie that was recently declared to be one of the 100 greatest films of all time? Zaslav will not see the light of heaven.

3. Right Wing Losers Cannot Handle the Queer Hotness of Kristen Stewart

Kristen Stewart is the cover star for the latest edition of Rolling Stone. She's promoting her latest film, Love Lies Bleeding, which is a lesbian bodybuilder retro noir that looks as though it has the potential to be the greatest movie ever made (I'm seeing it at the Glasgow Film Festival next week so I will report back!) Stewart's photoshoot was very sexy, with her wearing a jockstrap and rocking an androgynous look that is very in line with her fashion choices of the past decade. In the accompanying interview, Stewart says she wanted "to do the gayest f*cking thing you’ve ever seen in your life." Mission accomplished, honey. We love it.