I love the idea of Sam Mendes shooting four Beatles movies next year with a plan to release all four in ’27….bing, bang, boom, pow.

Each film will reportedly adopt the POV of a separate member, but I can’t envision Mendes focusing on the same portion of their story with four separate viewpoints — that would be oppressive.

Let’s assume the four films (which haven’t even been written yet) will cover separate chapters in the band’s grand saga — 7 years, 7 months, and 24 days, 1962 to 1970.

Chapter 1: Screaming Beatlemania — ignition, liftoff, orbit (’63 and ’64). Chapter 2: Musical maturation, experimentation and early psychedelic journeys (’65 and ’66, Rubber Soul and Revolver). Chapter 3: The gush of Sgt. Pepper creation (early to mid ’67), the death of Brian Epstein, the failure of Magical Mystery Tour, succumbing to gradual lethargy and uncertainty (late ’67 and ’68). Chapter 4: The disharmony of the White Album and the plague of Yoko Ono, followed by the low tide of the Get Back sessions and concluding with the high of recording Abbey Road (’69).

But it can’t really work unless the casting is other-worldly, and no casting decisions can be that. Nobody and I mean nobody can “play” John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. No matter who Mendes chooses to hire, it simply won’t work. Their faces and voices are too deeply embedded in every corner of our minds to convincingly replicate or even half-replicate in a narrative format.

The only way I would buy it would be if Mendes decided to rotoscope their story….shoot it with actors but alter the animated faces in such a way that audiences could accept that they’re watching a reasonable fascimile of the Real McCoys. Otherwise it can’t work. It just can’t.