You can read my full recap of the marketing campaign for Yesterday at The Hollywood Reporter.
Online and Social
The movie’s official website features a nice homepage design that has you click to bring in animation and the tagline, but the rest of the site is fairly rote in terms of content. Specifically called out is the Abbey Road performance by Patel. There are also Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles.
Media and Publicity
Boyle was interviewed about the process of making the film, including securing permission to use such an extensive selection of The Beatles’ catalog. Similar ground was covered along with insights into how he conceived the story in a later profile.
Patel performed “Yesterday” on “Kimmel” along with a chat about the movie. James showed up on “The Late Late Show” to similarly discuss the movie and The Beatles.
For Boyle, most of the recent press has focused on his comments about how he’s done with franchise films after walking away from Bond 25 or how he’d feel uncomfortable telling a story with a female lead. The former is understandable, as is the latter, though interpretations of his response have been more harsh while what he seems to have meant is that he’d rather lead a female filmmaker do so because they would make it more authentic.
Overall
There are a couple additional points I want to make that I shared with my THR editor but didn’t include in the original piece.
- The campaign makes it clear we’re continuing to fetishize the Lennon/McCartney songbook while giving short shrift to The Beatles’ *actual* best songs, which were written by Harrison.
- The trailer has a scene insinuating Coldplay exists in a world where The Beatles didn’t, a scenario that’s more audacious than any sci-fi story I’ve ever come across.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Picking Up the Spare
One more featurette from Universal with the cast sharing their favorite memories of The Beatles.
Curtis has continued to be a big part of the press push, with interviews about his history with romantic comedies and more.
So too there have been a number of additional interviews with Patel where he talked about working with Ed Sheeran, how he learned to embrace The Beatles’ music,
How the movie’s composers adapted the Lennon/McCartney catalog (poorly and on purpose) was the subject of this feature and the acquisition of the catalog and how it played into the movie’s production was covered here. Boyle did some press about the big twist ending as well.
Cinematic Slant 