The Beatles movies might already have made a big casting mistake that will be hard to ignore

That line-up undoubtedly consists of four of the finest young actors that the UK and Ireland currently has to offer. All four have proved their credentials across both small independent dramas and major big-budget blockbusters, with Mescal's superb Oscar-nominated lead role in Aftersun and Keoghan's heartbreaking supporting turn in The Banshees of Inisherin just two of the memorable performances the quartet have collectively offered in the last few years.

And yet, I can't help but find the announcement a little uninspiring. Clearly, I'm not alone: there's already been some early backlash to the news, with one major bone of contention being that no actors from Liverpool have been chosen to play four of the city's most famous sons.

But aside from those complaints, I also wonder if this could have been a brilliant opportunity to create four brand new stars – to find young performers with spades of both acting and musical talent and catapult them to super-stardom in much the same way that the Beatles took off after those early Cavern Club performances. I have no doubt that such performers are out there to be discovered, and so the decision to go for four already established names just seems a little... well, dull.

Of course, I fully understand that studios are often required to choose stars of a certain standing in order to ensure their projects are considered box office draws (Maya Hawke's recent comments that some producers are known to hire based on social media followings was a somewhat sobering reminder of this) but surely if there's one case where that might not be necessary it's in telling the story of the most famous band that ever was. Do cinemagoers really need to see big names attached to be convinced to see a film about the Beatles?

Choosing very famous actors to play very famous musicians is, of course, not a new thing. We need only go back a few months to Timothée Chalamet's Oscar-nominated performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown to find the most recent high-profile example. And while Chalamet was impressive in that role, I nonetheless found it hard to look past the fact that I was watching one of the most famous actors in the world dressed up in a costume and doing an – admittedly rather good – impression.

It's an issue which has come up time and time again, and it seems likely that the same might now be true for these Beatles films. Perhaps if Mendes and his team had chosen four actors who we had little prior association with, some of that might have been avoided. In other words, it would take less suspension of disbelief with an unknown than it does to buy that the long-haired guitar player from Stranger Things is actually George Harrison.

Interestingly, one of the things that stood out about the decision to cast a CGI chimpanzee as Robbie Williams in last year's bonkers biopic Better Man was that it stopped the audience making direct comparisons between actor and musician. And while I'm not saying that four different CGI animals should have been selected to take on the lead roles here (I'm also not not saying that), this did highlight the fact that sometimes outside-the-box casting is more interesting than just choosing big names when it comes to shaking up the biopic genre.

Shaking up the genre is clearly something Mendes very much has in mind – the decision to make four films in what is being dubbed as the the first "bingeable cinematic experience" is testament to that. And perhaps these films will still end up being another welcome antidote to the continued obsessions with staid, paint-by-numbers biopics – I just think it would have been a more interesting proposition with a less well-known cast.

The Beatles films will be released in April 2028.

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