The Beatles: Eight Days a Week

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles: Eight Days a Week , The Touring Years traces its subject between two places. One is the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles built their early live following. The other is their final concert, played in San Francisco in 1966. Ron Howard's 2016 documentary covers the band's touring years, spanning 1962 to 1966. In that stretch, a small club act grew into something too big to keep playing live shows at all. Assembling that story meant securing footage that had gone unseen for decades. Finishing it meant walking into a legal fight over who actually owned some of that footage. What was locked away in those old reels, and whose name ended up attached to the dispute over them?

• 2. Behind The Cameras

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  Brian Grazer, Nigel Sinclair, and Scott Pascucci produced the film alongside Ron Howard, who also directed it. Mark Monroe wrote the script, and Paul Crowder edited the finished picture. Marc Ambrose served as supervising producer. Getting the film made at all depended on cooperation from inside the Beatles' own circle. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took part directly, and so did Beatle widows Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. That circle's cooperation opened access to old concert reels that had gone unseen for decades, footage from a single 1965 show at Shea Stadium.

• 3. Restoring Shea Stadium

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  Thirty minutes of footage in the film came from a single concert, the Beatles' 1965 show at Shea Stadium. Ed Sullivan Productions filmed that concert, which had aired on television in 1966 under the title The Beatles at Shea Stadium. The set ran to 11 songs, originally shot on 35mm film. For this documentary, the reels were digitally restored to 4K resolution. Giles Martin remastered the audio; he is the son of the Beatles' producer George Martin. Even after that restoration work, the Shea Stadium sequence was shown only in theaters. It remains unavailable on any home video release of the film. A companion album arrived on the 9th of September 2016, timed to coincide with the film. It was an expanded, remixed, and remastered reissue of the 1977 album The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

• 4. Hulu Bets On The Beatles

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  Hulu announced the project on the 4th of May 2016, calling it the streaming service's first documentary acquisition. The deal was framed as the start of a planned Hulu Documentary Films collection. The film then premiered theatrically on the 15th of September 2016, in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Two days later, on the 17th of September, it began streaming on Hulu. Its opening weekend in North America brought in $785,336 from 85 theaters, an average of $9,239 per theater. By the end of its run, the film had grossed $2.9 million in the US and Canada. Other territories added $9.4 million, including $1.4 million in the UK, for a worldwide total of $12.3 million. Whether that box office matched critical opinion remained an open question.

• 5. Critics Weigh In

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  On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 96 percent approval rating based on 103 reviews, with an average score of 7.9 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads: "We love them, yeah, yeah, yeah, and with archival footage like that, you know The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, The Touring Years can't be bad." Metacritic gave the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 22 critics, a tally the site described as "generally favorable reviews." That critical reception fed into a run of nominations once awards season began.

• 6. An Awards Season Run

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  At the 1st Critics' Choice Documentary Awards in 2016, Ron Howard was nominated for Best Director. The film itself was nominated for Best Music Documentary. The following year, the 59th Grammy Awards nominated it for Best Music Film. At the 70th British Academy Film Awards, the film won Best Documentary. The 21st Satellite Awards nominated it for Best Documentary Film. The Australian Film Critics Association nominated it for Best Documentary Film, Local or International. The 69th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards brought the film's largest number of nominations. It won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. Mark Monroe was nominated for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming, and Paul Crowder for Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program. In the same ceremony, Jon Michaels, Harrison Meyle, Dan Kenyon, Will Digby, and Melissa Muik were nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing for Nonfiction Programming. Chris Jenkins, Cameron Frankley, Nathan Evans, and Sam O'Kell were nominated for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction Program. While the film picked up trophies and nominations, a legal dispute over the Shea Stadium footage had already begun.

• 7. A Fight Over The Footage

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  On the 12th of September 2016, representatives of Sid Bernstein sued Apple Corps and Subafilms Ltd. Bernstein had promoted the original 1965 Shea Stadium concert. The suit did not contest ownership of the songs themselves. It claimed the footage belonged to Sid Bernstein Presents, LLC, the company representing Bernstein's interests. Bernstein himself had died in 2013. The company sought an injunction to block the footage's release. It argued that Bernstein's ownership rested "by reason of being the producer of and having made creative contributions to the 1965 Shea Stadium performance, as well as being the employer for hire of the Beatles and the opening acts, who performed at his insistence and expense." Before filing suit, the company had already tried registering that ownership with the Copyright Office. Those applications were rejected. Paul Licalsi, a lawyer for Apple Corps, called the lawsuit "frivolous." He pointed to an agreement Bernstein had made with the band's management over film rights. He also noted that Bernstein had never raised a claim during his own lifetime. Exactly how that dispute resolved falls outside this record, but it left an authorship question hanging over eleven songs shot at Shea Stadium.