“Man on the Run,” Oscar winner Morgan Neville’s new documentary about Paul McCartney, is not a film about The Beatles. In fact, the story begins the day The Beatles broke up.
In the first teaser for “Man on the Run,” which IndieWire shares exclusively, we hear from McCartney in late 1969 as he begins to wonder what in the world he will do now, and how he can ever live up to anything as good as The Beatles ever again.
“Wings was part of it, but it’s really the story of this person who has been on this ride to outer space with The Beatles. He’s been doing it since he was 17. He’s never known anything else in his adult life, and he has to figure out everything from scratch,” Neville told IndieWire in one of his first interviews discussing the film.
“Man on the Run” premiered at Telluride this fall and was quickly scooped up by Amazon Prime Video. As announced today, the film will be released in theaters on February 18, 2026 and will then drop on Prime Video for streaming on February 27. Neville also revealed exclusively to IndieWire that alongside the film’s release will be a new soundtrack for the documentary of Paul McCartney and Wings music.
Neville’s film highlights McCartney’s 1970s, when he began the decade living reclusively on a farm away from the press and speculation about The Beatles. It charts his years-long legal battle with American record producer Allen Klein over The Beatles’ music and fortune, how he navigated the perception that he was the one who broke up the band and rumors that he was actually dead, and how he managed to mature from a Liverpool lad into a family man building a life with his first wife, Linda McCartney.
But most significantly, it’s a movie about the music. Neville takes us on a journey through how McCartney recorded his intimate, stripped-down solo records like “McCartney” and “Ram,” which were panned by critics in their day, and eventually made it back to the top of the pop charts with Wings for records like “Band on the Run.”
“We talk about how Paul himself has been coming to terms with what this music means over time, because at the time, a lot of this stuff was very painful for him,” Neville said. “Paul takes a lot of licks in the film. There’s a lot of stuff happening where it’s not working for him. I think Paul now is still processing and still figuring out how he feels about all this, trying to separate what was often painful at the time from how this music has endured. Having just spent years doing a deep dive through this catalog, it’s amazing the amount of incredible work he did through this decade.”
Neville said that part of what makes McCartney such a creative genius is that he’s a “deeply instinctual creator,” one who embraces whatever he’s feeling when something sparks. Sometimes that produces “Maybe I’m Amazed” or inspires him to travel to Africa to record “Band on the Run,” and other times, it has him recording a rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or an Old Hollywood-style musical special alongside a cartoon mouse.
“He just makes stuff, and some of it is fantastic and some isn’t, but I don’t think he’s there to judge himself,” Neville said. “I think he’s there to make stuff, and I actually find that really inspiring as a creative person, just that ability to not worry about the judgment too much.”
Neville began conducting interviews with McCartney and other members of Wings and his family around four years ago, and the resulting film is as remarkably edited and comprehensive as any of Neville’s recent biographical docs, including the two-part Steve Martin documentary, the Mister Rogers film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” and his Anthony Bourdain doc “Roadrunner.” But if “Man on the Run” is still not enough McCartney content for fans, there’s a book about Wings arriving soon that draws from some of Neville’s interviews.
Neville manages to squeeze some truly intimate anecdotes out of McCartney, who is as widely documented and interviewed as any public figure alive. In “Man on the Run,” McCartney reveals his inner thoughts from when he was in jail in Japan for marijuana possession, potentially facing up to seven years of hard labor, and a story of how he nearly drowned after swimming at a treacherous cliffside resort.
But what you will not see in “Man on the Run” is the now 83-year-old McCartney on camera. Neville made the conscious decision to only include audio interviews of McCartney in the film, and it makes “Man on the Run” that much more vital as a biographical documentary as a result.
“What you get from being audio-only is [that] it becomes a present-tense story. It feels like you’re living through it as it happens, as opposed to cutting to a much older person reflecting back on when they were young,” Neville said. “One thing Paul said when we discussed it, he said, ‘I don’t really want to be an old person in a young person’s story.'”
Watch the exclusive first teaser for “Man on the Run” above.
