The Beatles’ Movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ Cost $500,000, and It Was More Than Worth It
The Beatles exist in a stratosphere all their own decades after they broke up. The music still resonates, and the band members — living and dead — are still celebrated. So are the group’s other projects, such as The Beatles’ first movie A Hard Day’s Night. It cost $500,000 to make, which was well worth it beyond the box office receipts. Paul McCartney said filming the movie was nerve-wracking, but it came with a huge payoff.
‘A Hard Day’s Night’ more than recouped its $500,000 budget
A Hard Day’s Night (1964) was like many other movies. A screenwriter (Alun Owen) penned the script. A director (Richard Lester) helmed the shoot. And actors (many of them anonymous in the U.S. aside from The Beatles) performed in it.
Yet it comes off as a quasi-documentary with Paul, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr fending off rabid fans at the height of Beatlemania as they try to get to a TV appearance.
According to Paul McCartney: A Life author Peter Ames Carlin, it cost $500,000 to make the movie. Ames writes that even by 1964 standards, that was hardly an outlandish budget. According to Box Office Mojo, it earned $2.3 million at the box office in its lifetime, meaning it nearly quintupled the budget. Regardless of the Beatles’ paycheck, it was worth far more than the $500,000 cost.
The Beatles became multimedia artists with the ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ movie
Screaming fans hounding the band were par for the course for The Beatles in 1964. Yet part of the payoff from A Hard Day’s Night was finding a way to connect with their fans in a new way.
They toured regularly at the time and made frequent TV appearances, but that doesn’t mean that every fan who wanted to see The Beatles could. The A Hard Day’s Night movie provided their rabid fans another avenue to participate in Beatlemania that was more widely accessible.
Perhaps more importantly, it established Paul, John, Ringo, and George as more than musicians. Other Beatles movies and film project followed: Help!, the Paul-imagined Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine. There was also the international satellite broadcast where The Beatles first sang “All You Need Is Love,” one of their most experimental songs. That was just the tip of the iceberg.
John published two books — In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works — in 1964 and 1965, respectively. When he married Yoko Ono, he veered off the pop music path and created soundscapes that were avant-garde art in their own right. His artwork drew attention after his death. The book Real Love includes several lighthearted sketches he made for his son, Sean.
Ringo forged a solid acting career, which included starring alongside Peter Sellers in the madcap movie The Magic Christian and a notably strong performance in That’ll Be the Day in 1973.
George discovered another way to stay in the entertainment business. His production company, Handmade Films, financed several movies, most notably Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and the Python-adjacent Time Bandits.
The campy A Hard Day’s Night movie was worth more to The Beatles than a paycheck. It lent legitimacy to their other artistic endeavors.
Paul McCartney had a creative misfire long after The Beatles
Paul was mainly responsible for Magical Mystery Tour, which was widely panned at the time but produced an overlooked Beatles album. He wasn’t as successful with his 1984 movie/soundtrack Give My Regards to Broad Street project.
The soundtrack produced the hit song “No More Lonely Nights,” but Paul needed help from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour to make it a winner. The movie earned dreadful reviews (critics and fans on Rotten Tomatoes panned it), but it did bring several key Beatles’ players (Paul, Ringo, producer George Martin, engineer Geoff Emerick) together again.
Paul had better luck with a 1998 webcast he put together after his wife Linda’s death. He discusses his and Linda’s shared passion for animals and shows off his comedy chops in a bit where he makes his mashed potatoes recipe.
We wouldn’t be surprised if The Beatles made the movie for A Hard Day’s Night merely to cash in on their rising fame and crank out another album. The bigger benefit was that it established them as multimedia artists, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo took full advantage of that credibility for years after the band disintegrated.
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