Your First Look at The Beatles Movies Came in a Peculiar Postcard Form

It will be over two years until anyone gets to see Sam Mendes’ four movies about The Beatles, yet everyone already has Beatlemania over the impressive cast Mendes and Sony have assembled. And the first official look at the Fab Four in costume? It wasn’t care of some big showy spectacle, but a trip to where it all started in Liverpool.

Fans got their first look at Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, and Barry Keoghan as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, respectively, this week, but the images, one of each actor as each Beatle, were issued in a peculiar way: in the form of a postcard.

Four postcard-sized images were distributed to students at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, or LIPA, of the primary cast. The school even hid them around campus for students to find, though they would not be the first Beatles fans looking for clues in bizarre places. Fortunately, some students decided to share them online to give the rest of us a better look and save us the legwork.

The photo of Mescal as Paul McCartney looks like a younger Paul inside the Cavern Club, and Dickinson as John Lennon is another late-’60s looking John singing into a microphone somewhere, while Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Quinn as George Harrison are each in the studio, again looking more like their older selves rather than the younger mop-top crew.

For now, this is just a marketing stunt by Sony, IndieWire understands, and more traditional images and first look photos will be shared online later. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Sony gave us a bigger tease at CinemaCon this April in Las Vegas.

In fact, it was there last year that the four cast members came out together on stage for the first time and where Sony also shared what has been the biggest marketing stunt of all: planning to release all four Beatles movies, one dedicated to each member of the band, in the same month in April 2028. It’s a massive risk, and with Mendes shooting all four movies at once (and dedicating an entire year to do so), there’s a lot of questions for just how this will be successfully executed and if people will go to the theater for all four.

In addition to the main cast, The Beatles films have also casted the band’s primary partners, including Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, and Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd. Also cast are James Norton as band manager Brian Epstein, Harry Lloyd as producer George Martin, David Morrissey as Paul’s father Jim McCartney, Leanne Best as John’s aunt Mimi Smith, Bobby Schofield as road manager Neil Aspinall and Daniel Hoffmann-Gill as road manager Mal Evans, Arthur Darvill as journalist Derek Taylor, and Adam Pally as American businessman Allen Klein.

Sony has also teased that we’ll be getting casting announcements for Ravi Shankhar, Cynthia Lennon, and others (we imagine Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston could all be candidates).

“The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” as it is officially titled for now, are being directed, written, and produced by Mendes through his Neal Street banner alongside Pippa Harris and Julie Pastor. Alexandra Derbyshire is also producing. Sony Pictures is making the films in association with label Apple Corps.

See the images blown up to Zapruder level via a Barry Keoghan fan account below: