Subject: Re: movies
I so enjoyed this movie, I was surprised it wasn’t a bigger hit.

I remember seeing the trailers and thinking it would have problems. Rom-coms haven't done well at the box office for quite a while for a lot of cultural and sociological reasons (we've run out of reasons to keep the couple separate in the first act so they can struggle to get together by the third act). High-concept rom-com is an even harder sell. Though the high-concept can solve some of the structural rom-com problems, the central hook here ("what if the Beatles never existed?") doesn't do that - the "what if" premise doesn't actually keep them apart.

I watched a bit of it, but couldn't get out of my own head about how ridiculous the underlying premise was, so I didn't enjoy it at all and stopped watching shortly after the Ed Sheeran parts. My fault entirely, of course. I couldn't get past how it didn't make sense that anyone in a modern musical culture where the Beatles didn't exist in the sixties would want to hear "new to them" Beatles songs fifty years later, and that the film had no interest in interrogating that. A "new" Beatles song introduced into the world of 2020 wouldn't be applauded - it would sound dated, out-of-touch and derivative. The Beatles were the Beatles because they were revolutionary and visionary and groundbreaking and a cultural phenomenon rooted in the time of their creative output, and they changed music. Most "alt-history" high-concept stuff tries to play with the idea that the change that created the "alt" part has actual repercussions in the world, but Yesterday is entirely premised on the idea that the "alt" event absolutely does not.