Academy Award–winning director Ron Howard adds “Beatles documentarian” to his résumé with Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years. Howard’s doc will follow the Beatles on tour from 1962–1966, promising exclusive footage and insight into the early years of their career. Eight Days a Week was produced with the blessing of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (who both appear as talking heads in the trailer) as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison.
Beatlemania has already been well-chronicled (to say the least), but they’ve arguably never gotten a definitive, widely available concert documentary. And Howard told Rolling Stone in 2014 that his doc will include rare footage of the band, including restored Super 8 video of the Beatles in concert: “We can now sync it up [to audio recordings] and create a concert experience so immersive and so engaging, I believe you’re going to actually feel like you’re somewhere in the sixties, seeing what it was like to be there, feeling it and hearing it. And as a film director, that’s a fantastic challenge.”
The documentary will be released in theaters Sept. 16 and will be available on Hulu immediately after, as part of the streaming service’s new focus on documentary films.
