Premium online streaming service Hulu has secured the exclusive U.S. streaming video on-demand rights to Academy Award Winner Ron Howard’s feature documentary The Beatles: Eight Days A Week (working title), the company announced during its annual Upfronts presentation at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday (May 4th).
Featuring rare and exclusive footage, the film is produced with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison. White Horse Pictures’ Grammy Award-winning Nigel Sinclair, Scott Pascucci and Academy Award-winner and multiple nominee Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment are producing with Howard. Apple Corps Ltd’s Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde are serving as executive producers, along with Imagine’s Michael Rosenberg and White Horse’s Guy East and Nicholas Ferrall.
“This is something really special,” McCartney said as he was joined by Howard via satellite. “The film brings back a lot of great memories for me of my bandmates. We’re excited to share it with you.”
Debuting in theaters and on Hulu this fall, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week is based on the first part of The Beatles’ career from 1962 to 1966 – the period in which they toured and captured the world’s acclaim. Howard’s film will explore how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together to become this extraordinary phenomenon, “The Beatles.” It will explore their inner workings – how they made decisions, created their music and built their collective career together – all the while, exploring The Beatles’ extraordinary and unique musical gifts and their remarkable, complementary personalities. The film will focus on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The Cavern Club in Liverpool to their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966.
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week marks the first documentary feature to premiere exclusively on Hulu following its theatrical run and comes to Hulu in the company’s first-ever licensing deal with Apple Corps Ltd. The film will be the first to launch under the new Hulu Documentary Films arm, which will serve as a new home for premium original and exclusive documentary film titles coming to Hulu.
Award-winning Editor Paul Crowder is the editor with Crowder’s long-time collaborator, Mark Monroe, serving as writer. Marc Ambrose is a supervising producer of The Beatles: Eight Days A Week.
During the presentation, Hulu also announced a partnership with Live Nation Entertainment to present select concert performances from popular artists in virtual reality. The experience will give fans a rare opportunity to hang out backstage with artists and capture the essence of what it’s like to walk onstage in front of a roaring crowd. Artists and a launch date will be revealed at a later time.
Hulu says its subscriber base has grown over 30% year over year and will reach 12 million subscribers in the U.S. by the end of this month. The company, a joint venture between 21st Century Fox, Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal, also announced plans to launch a cable-like digital service in 2017 that would combine live brodcasting feeds from broadcast and cable networks along with its current on-demand platform. Terms to include ESPN, Disney Channel, Fox News, FX and others are currently being negotiated. Prices are rumored to be around $40 per month for the new service, but no other details were given as of press time.
