In Laman's Terms: Remember When Robert Zemeckis Was Going To Make A Yellow Submarine Movie With Motion-Capture Animation?

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

With this Friday's new release, Yesterday (which, as of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, I have yet to see), we see the newest in a long line of movies inspired by the iconic music of The Beatles, a band whose songs have a widespread presence in cinema with films hailing from a whole assortment of filmmakers ranging from Julie Taymor to Jessie Nelson. As for the band itself, they have a more sparse presence in terms of people portraying versions of them in music biopics. Plenty of movies have been made about the era in which The Beatles music changed everything but few have actually dared to star actors playing The Beatles.


The task of actually portraying Ringo, Paul, John and George in a Bohemian Rhapsody-esque music biopic seems to be too daunting of a task for filmmakers and actors to contemplate taking on. The closest we'll likely ever get is that amazing scene from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story where an assortment of comedians, including Paul Rudd as John Lennon, do their best Beatles impressions. What's likely not helping the prospect of doing a music biopic of The Beatles is that The Beatle themselves already have a notable presence in cinema. Joaquin Phoenix had big shoes to fill in portraying Johnny Cash, but Cash at least had never starred in a narrative film before, whereas The Beatles starred in a number of popular films as themselves in the mid-1960s.

One of those films, Yellow Submarine (which, admittedly, only featured the actual Beatles briefly), was actually almost remade in the early 2010s by none other than Robert Zemeckis, who was planning to bring his career full-circle after kicking off his directorial career with the Beatles-centric comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Zemeckis was planning on making this new version of Yellow Submarine with the motion-capture animation technology he was so deeply enamored with in the first decade of the 21st-century as well as releasing the title in 2012. This film would have been done as part of his ImageMovers Digital production company output deal with Disney. Conceptually, it feels like this project was doomed from the get-go even beyond just the enormous task of asking actors to take on the task of actually portraying the individual members of The Beatles.

Put simply, motion-capture is a technology that, in the hands of Zemeckis, was always used to emulate reality, usually to disappointing results. His motion-capture efforts, even when featuring Santa Claus or dragons, tended to place an emphasis on realism, which feels like a poor fit when remaking a hand-drawn animated cartoon whose psychedelic visuals couldn't be more detached from reality.  But Zemeckis and company plowed on, with the film gaining enough steam to actually sign on actors to play The Beatles. Cary Elwes was set to be George Harrison, Peter Serafinowicz was onboard as Paul McCartney, Lennox Kelly was set for John Lennon and Adam Campbell would be Ringo Starr. The vocals for performances of Beatles tunes would come courtesy of archival recordings of the actual band rather than having Cary Elwes belt out Hey Jude.

The logo for Disney's Yellow Submarine remake

Considering how much Disney loves to attach themselves to big world-renowned brands, it's shocking they didn't move heaven and Earth to release a movie associating themselves with The Beatles. So what stopped the project from coming into being? Disney's falling out with ImageMovers Digital mainly. Their inaugural feature, A Christmas Carol, came up short at the box office and their deal with Disney was shuttered before their second release, Mars Needs Moms!, became one of the biggest box office flops of all-time. Mars have may have needed all those Moms, but Disney didn't need ImageMovers Digital and that meant prospective projects for the company like this Yellow Submarine reboot ended up getting canned.

Robert Zemeckis, who has moved back into VFX-heavy live-action cinema in the 2010s, has subsequently claimed the pressures of doing a remake also caused this take on Yellow Submarine to remain in port. This meant the world was spared a motion-capture animation version of this beloved animated feature, though pieces of leaked concept art from the project scattered across the internet give a glimpse into the horrors of what we might have been subjected to. This Yellow Submarine remake was the closest the 2010s have come to delivering a movie starring The Beatles themselves, but films like Yesterday ensure that their music will continue to be a prominent part of cinema all over the world. Also lasting eternally? That hysterical Beatles scene from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.