MFAH Film New Releases: The Beatles: Eight Days a WeekThe Touring Years

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents the New Releases film series. Enjoy these critically acclaimed, award-winning international films as they make their Houston debut!

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years

Director Ron Howard
Released 2016
Country USA
Running Time 137 minutes
Format Digital, Color

From June 1962 to the time the band quit touring in August 1966, the Beatles performed 815 times in 15 different countries and 90 cities around the world. The cultural phenomenon that their touring helped create, known as “Beatlemania,” was something the world had never seen before and, arguably, hasn’t since. It was the first time that much of the world felt truly unified—bound by aspiration and attitude, rather than divided by race, class, religion, or nationality.

Directed by Academy Award–winning filmmaker Ron Howard, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years tells the story of these years from the perspectives of the band, the fans, and their world. The film re-creates the touring experience through the eyes of the band members themselves, where every stop was an adventure. Along the way, the documentary delves into the inner workings of the group, how they made decisions, created their music, and built a collective career together.

Drawing from more than 100 hours of rare and unseen footage collected from fans, news outlets, and national archives, as well as the Beatles’ own private collection, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week crafts a cinematic experience unlike any Beatles film that has come before, and unlike any other documentary. In addition to multiple new and in-depth interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as a host of names with direct experience of the times—Elvis Costello, Whoopi Goldberg, Larry Kane, and Kitty Oliver, among others—the film includes 12 performances from the concerts. The footage has been elegantly recut and remastered in high-definition and 5.1 surround sound, providing the closest experience possible to seeing the Beatles play live.

Read the 10 things Rolling Stone magazine learned from the documentary.