The Fifth Beatle

To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, THE FIFTH BEATLE by Vivek J. Tiwary, Andrew Robinson and Kyle Baker is being made into a movie. Payton Reed (The Break-Up and Bring It ON) will direct. While many claim to be the Fifth Beatle, this one is about manager Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles to worldwide success before killing himself. Tivary wrote the book and a screenplay and is a heavy hitter Tony-winning Broadway producer, and this film will have lots of Beatles songs in it, and would also make a dandy Broadway show at some point. The GN, which is very good, was kinda proof of concept for the movie, but hey, it seems to have worked this time.

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Director Bryan Singer tweeted


and pulses raced, and then it was confirmed, that X-Men: Apocalypse will open on May 27, 2016. Apocalypse is, if course, one of the major X-villains, with the Age of Apocalypse storyline from 1995 being one of the biggest X-storyline ever, written by everyone from Scott Lobdell to Mark Waid to Warren Ellis. It’s another one of those popular “alternate history” stories that involves all out mutant war, so we now have casting speculation to last us right into the next mid-term elections.

5 COMMENTS

  1. I was kinda hoping Singer would use the time travel plot to retcon The Last Stand and do The Phoenix Saga the way he was originally imagining.

  2. From “Days of Future Past” to “Age of Apocalypse “.

    Too soon? Or is one a continuation of the other?

    Or might we see an “Exiles” series develop from this?
    It would be clever for Fox to exploit their Marvel mutant license this way.

    If they can tie all of their movies into one big timeline (which is more audacious than what Marvel Studios is doing with their linear releases), then their older movies become an evergreen backlist.

  3. “this film will have lots of Beatles songs in it…”

    That would surprise me. Beatles songs are Rey expensive to use, and if Paul or Yoko have any objections to the book it could be a further setback.

  4. Meh. In my opinion, this is completely the wrong way to take X-men. The idea of going right from the soft reboot into time travel and skipping the actual first class to go right to another Wolverine centered movie seems like a dumb movie. Not entirely unexpected, but still disappointing. Even if fans would love to see these characters, you have to ask if the context works based on what you already have.

    The trouble with comic book films is you’re taking a serial long form story and squishing it into two hours that takes at least two years for each installment. X-men is really a soap opera and would best on television, but certainly the tv budget isn’t quite enough for these merry mutants.

    Then again, I wonder if Singer really works the fantastic aspects of the X-men books well. We can have outlandish characters like Cable and Apocalypse, but we still gotta stick to the pre-Nolan pseudo-realism nonsense of the black leather costumes for X-men?

    Now X-men has always been about both colorful costumes and characters and powers to deal with real world bigotry. I don’t think Singer ever got the former even if he did pretty well with the latter.

    And I just wish they would develop the Xavier school and the X-men before jumping into the future with Apocalypse and DoFP. The First Class film didn’t even have the first X-men, more of a proto-class. They could have had a whole film with Scott and Jean and the first class joining the team and dealing with Magneto while the government hires Trask to make sentinels to hunt mutants. They had the perfect set up for a clean reboot. Instead the greedy idiots at Fox want to tie everything together and make a nice neat box set. Instead we are dragging all the older actors back into the picture and mixing it up with (ugh) time travel and now we’re even setting up for Apocalypse. Geez. I like the character, but he’s being shoehorned in way way too soon.

  5. while brian epstein plays a major role in the history of the beatles, in bringing the group to the world and helping to create their image, when all is said and done, it’s gonna be the music that will make or break the band. in that respect, it was george martin that , from the very beginning worked with the beatles every step of the way (not including that “let it be” bump in the road). for example, in the song “good morning , good morning”, lennon wanted for the end of the song the sounds of one animal being followed by another animal overpowering the first. it was george martin that made it happen. he was in the mix (so to speak) as much as the beatles were in the creation of their music.. this is why i feel that george martin deserves the title of “fifth beatle”, not to take anything away from epstein. his importance in the story of the beatles is huge. i also understand that from a storytelling point of view, epstein’s life and tragic death is a lot more interesting and dramatic than martin’s. while a play or movie based on martin’s life would be filled with some fantastic music (considering all the artists he’s worked with over the decades), the parts inbetween would would probably only be of interest to hard core music lovers.

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