Of all the dogmatic traditions in film and television, and there are many, run-time has always been one of the more puzzling ones. We have preconceived notions of what constitutes a feature film, yet there is no standard industry measure to determine this.
If you ask the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences or The American Film Institute, a film must be at least 40 minutes long to qualify as a feature rather than a short. The Screen Actor’s Guild draws the same line at 60 minutes. The National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image in France once, and perhaps currently, bestows feature status on films whose 35 MM prints extend beyond 1,600 meters (58 minutes and 28 seconds).
While there is no maximum runtime, most films have historically had to fall within the reasonable limits of what a theatrical audience can tolerate as well as what makes the best business sense for the exhibitors themselves.
For decades, television formats were a little easier to pin down. Comedies and dramas were broken up into 30-minute and 60-minute episodes respectively.
But the expansion of the streaming market in the last decade has put all of these once familiar notions to the test. As more companies directly control their means of distribution, the length of a piece of content is increasingly dictated more by the creative and less by external requirements like ad inventory, daily showings per theater, and so on.
This has mostly been a good thing. The trend has allowed filmmakers to break out of old boxes and has even helped give birth to entirely new kinds of formats.
Of all the platforms out there, I believe Disney Plus is one of the leaders best embracing creative innovation in this area.
Take for example their flagship series The Mandalorian. The first two seasons of this show are comprised of episodes that range anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes. The platform also does a great job of presenting its short films with as much discovery value (how and where the films appear in the user experience) as their tentpole features.
And now Disney Plus is home to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, an eight-hour 3 part event (in the words of Disney). They are right to create a different type of classification for this as it certainly defies any easy categorization. In essence, it is a film, almost as if the three distinct acts have been broken up into different feature length segments, each basically a film in its own right.
The release signifies an exciting moment in time, wherein the now-infamous trove of Beatles footage, long considered off-limits, can be presented in an experience befitting of the subjects and drama within it. The extended run time makes it possible for us as an audience to experience each nuance of these well-documented but little understood weeks in the band’s history. Jackson has managed to sculpt a narrative from over 60 hours of material that captures all the angst, baggage, and subtext we all now know so well but have never been able to really see plainly with our own eyes.
The result is a sort of docu-voyeurism that gives us the sensation that we are indeed hanging out with The Beatles. We get to witness firsthand every glance and awkward pause. We watch works that have become legendary cultural mainstays manifest, sometimes painfully, into existence.
But best of all we get to see these four giants as human beings. This is possible because of the air allowed into the film. Peter Jackson believes there would have been no way to make this film any shorter. This is the first title of his filmography where I happen to agree with him.
Watching all the songs come together (yeah, meant it) got me thinking about all the other times the Beatles have been seen or heard in films. Of course, we all know they starred in their own movies (A Hard Day’s Night, Magical Mystery Tour, Help!, etc…) but I thought it would be interesting to see where else their music can be found.
It turns out coming across a Beatles tune in a film is relatively rare. In total, only 80 films feature at least one Beatles track. This includes the aforementioned Beatles movies. By comparison, The Rolling Stones show up in the soundtrack to 176 films.
Licensing even a single Beatles tune is a big feat of economics and logistics. Typically producers will need to shell out at least $250,000 for the appropriate rights to a song as well as gain approval from a range of stakeholders including the publisher, McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison.
Despite those challenges, 122 Beatles songs have managed to find their way into movies. Here are the top 20 most popular Beatles songs in film.
The film with the most amount of songs (24) is fittingly Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living In The Material World which is another Beatles documentary epic encompassing multiple parts.
Second to that, and even higher in the list than the group’s own films, is Robert Zemeckis’s first feature I Wanna Hold Your Hand from 1978. Miraculously for its relatively small budget, the film includes 17 Beatles tracks. I’ve never seen this film, and unfortunately it’s not available to stream, rent, or buy anywhere.
From there the titles become more varied. About half of all the movies featuring Beatles music are available to watch. I thought it would be fun to assemble a menu that included all of them regardless of any other factors we usually weigh. As you go down the list, the song usage will likely become more fleeting, mere seconds in the movie perhaps (with one epic exception). But the filmmakers have worked hard to put them there for a reason.
A final note, this list only takes into account actual tracks recorded by The Beatles. It does not include covers.
This week’s menu is ordered based on the total number of songs and includes which specific tracks you can hear.
Check out Get Back if you haven’t yet, and let me know if you discover anything interesting in the list here.
Happy watching (and listening)!