EXCLUSIVE: Magnolia Pictures is taking North American rights to Kevin Macdonald’s documentary One to One: John & Yoko, which after making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and playing at Telluride is making a pit stop in the Spotlight section this week at the Sundance Film Festival. One to One: John & Yoko is getting an April 11 release exclusively in Imax. Pic will air on HBO and stream on Max in late 2025.
The docu is a revelatory look at the 18 months John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent living in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s with never-before-seen material and newly restored footage of Lennon’s only full-length, post-Beatles concert. Sean Ono Lennon, the couple’s son, oversaw the audio remastering of the concert in the pic.
On August 30, 1972, in New York City, John Lennon played his only full-length show after leaving the Beatles: the One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. It’s the starting in Oscar winner Macdonald’s doc into the lives of John and Yoko. By 1971 the couple was newly arrived in the U.S. — living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and watching a huge amount of American television. As the duo experience a year of love and transformation, they begin to change their approach to protest — ultimately leading to the One to One concert, which was inspired by a Geraldo Rivera exposé they watched on TV.
“One to One: John & Yoko is a revelation,” said Magnolia Pictures co-CEOs Eamonn Bowles and Dori Begley. “Kevin Macdonald has given us an incredibly fresh, marvelously human and revealing look at the iconic couple.”
“I am personally thrilled to be back with the Magnolia and HBO teams to be giving One to One: John & Yoko the ambitious theatrical release that I always dreamed of for this film,” said Macdonald. “This is a movie about music and love and politics and about immersing yourself in the year of 1972 — a period in time that feels uncannily like the world we are currently inhabiting. And more than anything else I’m grateful to Sean Lennon and Mercury Studios for entrusting the incredible One to One concert to me.”
One to One: John & Yoko was edited and co-directed by Sam Rice-Edwards. A Mercury Studios presents A Plan B/KM Films & Mercury Studios production, it is produced by Peter Worsley, Macdonald and Alice Webb. EPs are Marc Robinson, David Joseph, Steve Condie, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner.
The deal was negotiated by Magnolia SVP of Acquisitions John Von Thaden, with Cinetic on behalf of the filmmakers.
Macdonald won a Feature Documentary Oscar for 2000’s One Day in September, which follows the 1972 Munich Olympic Games when Palestinian terrorist group Black September killed nine members of the Israeli team after a hostage standoff. Macdonald has also directed such feature films as The Mauritanian, The Eagle, the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland and Black Sea.
Link to article here
