Yesterday (2019 film)

Did You Know?

• Licensing the Beatles discography cost the producers close to $10 million.
• The soundtrack was released by Capitol Records on 21 June 2019, seven days before the film's UK and US release.
• Universal spent $75.4 million on promotion for the film.

Plot

Jack Malik, a singer-songwriter from Lowestoft, can barely draw a crowd at his shows. His childhood friend and manager, Ellie Appleton, who teaches math, keeps pushing him to hold onto his dream. During a global blackout that lasts twelve seconds, a bus hits Jack. After he wakes up, he plays the Beatles' "Yesterday" for his friends.

They love it and think he wrote it. To his shock, they have no idea who the Beatles are. A quick online search turns up nothing, and his own record collection is missing their albums. He figures out he is in a world where the Beatles never existed.

So Jack starts passing off their songs as his own. Ellie sets him up to record a demo with a local producer named Gavin. After he performs on local TV, Ed Sheeran asks Jack to open for him in Moscow. Ellie has a parents' evening at school, so she stays behind, and Jack's roadie Rocky goes with him instead.

After the show, Jack beats Ed in a songwriting contest by playing "The Long and Winding Road." In Los Angeles, Ed's tough manager Debra Hammer signs Jack and pushes him to global stardom. At his farewell party before moving to LA, Ellie tells Jack she has always loved him. He starts recording an album at EastWest Studios but blanks on the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby."

Hoping to jog his memory, he goes to Liverpool and visits Strawberry Field, Penny Lane, and Eleanor Rigby's grave. Ellie meets him there, and after a drunken night they kiss, but she says she does not want a one-night stand. The next day, Jack and Rocky chase her to Liverpool Lime Street station. She congratulates him but says she cannot be part of his celebrity life.

Heartbroken, Jack goes back to Los Angeles, and Ellie starts dating Gavin. The label rejects his album title ideas, which are all Beatles album names, and calls it One Man Only. Jack talks them into launching it with a rooftop concert in Gorleston-on-Sea. After the show, two people who also remember the Beatles come up to him backstage. They thank him for keeping the music alive, even though they know he did not write it.

Production

Yesterday was produced by Perfect World Pictures, Working Title Films, Decibel Films and Dentsu Inc., and distributed by Universal Pictures. It began as a 2012 screenplay, Cover Version, by American writer Jack Barth. Barth conceived the story when he realised that if Star Wars did not exist and he conceived it, he would not be able to sell it. In Barth's script, Jack did not find success with the Beatles songs.

British actor Mackenzie Crook worked on an early version and intended to direct, but left to work on his television series Detectorists. The script was passed to Working Title. Years later, while working on clearance rights for the Beatles songs, a Working Title producer mentioned the screenplay to Richard Curtis, who bought it and rewrote it as a romantic comedy. On Curtis's insistence, the screenplay is credited to Curtis and the story to Curtis and Barth.

Curtis told interviewers he did not read Barth's script, preferring to use the premise to write his own version. However, according to Barth, the final film includes many elements of his screenplay, including Lennon as a wizened fisherman and a joke about Harry Potter. Curtis credited the Harry Potter joke to a suggestion from American comedian Sarah Silverman, who is thanked in the credits. Barth complained that Curtis took sole credit for the screenplay and damaged him financially, feeling Curtis changed the story to reflect his own successful career.

Reception

The Beatles-inspired romantic comedy Yesterday earned $73.3 million in the US and Canada and $81.3 million elsewhere, including $19.4 million in the UK, for a global haul of $154.6 million on a $26 million budget. It remained in the American top ten for its first five weeks. On opening weekend, it pulled in $17 million from 2,603 theaters, landing in third place behind Toy Story 4 and Annabelle Comes Home. Its first day brought in $6.1 million, with $1.25 million from Thursday previews.

The second weekend added $10.7 million, again finishing third behind Spider-Man: Far From Home and Toy Story 4, and the third weekend saw $6.8 million, dropping to fifth. Deadline Hollywood estimated a net profit of $45 million, though Universal recorded a $87.8 million loss on the film in 2019; Deadline calculated that TV and video sales would eventually yield a $26.5 million profit. CinemaScore audiences gave it an A- average. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded four stars, praising the “puppyish zest and fun” from director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis.

Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph admired its “beautifully judged and surprisingly moving finale.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety dismissed it as a “rom-com wallpapered with the Beatles’ greatness.” Laura Snapes of The Guardian called it “the latest jukebox movie to put its women on mute.” Paul McCartney said he and his wife loved seeing it in the Hamptons.

Boyle sent copies to Ringo Starr and his wife, as well as George Harrison’s widow Olivia, receiving “lovely messages” from both. Yoko Ono approved of John Lennon’s depiction.

Comparisons

Several other works have a similar premise involving parallel worlds or time travel. The 2010 Japanese manga I'm a Beatle by Tetsuo Fujii and Kaiji Kawaguchi involves an almost identical concept of a musician travelling back to 1961 and being surprised when no one knows of the Beatles. Others include the 2011 French graphic novel Yesterday, the 1990s British sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, the 2006 French film Jean-Philippe, and Nick Milligan's 2013 novel Enormity. Danny Boyle said he was not aware of earlier works with similar premises when he read the script but later became aware of a French film and Goodnight Sweetheart after the first trailer was revealed.