The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years looks at the years when the band went from playing Liverpool clubs to performing in front of huge crowds around the world, covering roughly 1962 to 1966. Through concert footage, interviews and archival material, it traces how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr handled a schedule packed with live dates, and how the four of them worked together as a group and wrote songs while the scale of their fame kept growing. The film follows the story up to the point when the demands of touring became too great, leading the band to stop playing concerts and move into the studio instead.

Ron Howard directed, working from a screenplay by Mark Monroe and P.G. Morgan, with Brian Grazer, Howard and Nigel Sinclair among the producers. It was released in September 2016, arriving between Howard's Inferno and Solo: A Star Wars Story as the twenty-fifth of the thirty-two films he has directed. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr appear as themselves, while Lennon and Harrison feature through archive footage, alongside contributions from Larry Kane and Whoopi Goldberg.

The documentary drew a 7.8 rating on IMDb from around 14,000 votes and a 7.5 on TMDB from a smaller pool of voters. It grossed about 12 million dollars worldwide, a solid result for a music documentary.