The Beatles universe on Disney+ continues to grow. After the outstanding documentary The Beatles: Get Back by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was released three years ago, the next exciting music project is now coming. Actually, it’s the foundation, the Jacksons 470 minute epic made possible in the first place.
Disney+ secures the big Beatles film that hasn’t been shown publicly in 50 years
As the Hollywood Reporter reports, Disney+ will release on May 8, 2024 the long-lost film Let It Be by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It hasn’t been shown to the public in 50 years, neither in the cinema nor on television. Now it is celebrating its streaming premiere in a revised version.
In Let It Be, Lindsay-Hogg accompanies the Mushroom Heads from Liverpool Recording her last studio album in 1969. A year later, when the film was released, the Beatles had already broken up – an event that completely overshadowed the film’s release and turned the cinema trip into a kind of requiem for the band’s fans.
Disney+
The Beatles: Get Back
“This is the first time in over 50 years that the film will be available”, says the official Disney+ press release. The film was restored by Jackson’s team, who already worked on The Beatles: Get Back. Original director Lindsay-Hogg also wrote the new version of the film gave his blessing.
He is quoted in the press release as saying:
Let it Be was completed in October/November 1969, but [der Film] didn’t come out until April 1970. A month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up. And that’s how people saw Let it Be with sadness in your heart and thought, ‘I’ll never see the Beatles together again. I’ll never have that joy again,’ and that really clouded the perception of the film. No longer the Beatles breakup film: thanks to Get Back, the view of Let It Be has completely changed
While Let It Be was once a cinematic testament to the breakup of the Beatles, the view of the 1969 recordings has changed enormously since the release of The Beatles: Get Back. Here we dive deep into the creative process the band and at the end even experience their last concert, the legendary Rooftop Concert
Lindsay Hogg explains:
Once you get to the roof you can see their excitement, their camaraderie and her sheer joy, to play together as a group again. Knowing, as we do now, that it was the last time, one looks at this scene with full understanding of who they were and still are, and with a little melancholy.
As with The Beatles: Get Back, Jackson’s team focused on this during the restoration original 16mm negative by Lindsay Hoggs. There is material to be seen that was not yet part of Jackson’s documentary. This makes the documentary both a perfect addition and a dive into the origins of the material.
Let It Be launches on Disney+ on May 8, 2024. You can currently stream all three episodes of The Beatles: Get Back (including the Rooftop Concert) there.