A Beatles Film Unavailable For Decades Is Coming To Disney+

It must be the 1960s all over again because Beatlemania is running wild with no signs of stopping anytime soon. Fans of the legendary band have been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years, between Peter Jackson's Disney+ docuseries "The Beatles: Get Back" in 2021, another Beatles-centric project that the director is reportedly working on, and, of course, the recent news that Sam Mendes will be giving the pop group the "Avengers" treatment with a series of four separate biopics in the near future. Now, it seems Jackson's efforts have directly led to yet another celebration of the Fab Four.

This latest instance of Hollywood doing everything they can to whip up some serious Beatles nostalgia, however, comes courtesy of Disney. In a press release, the studio announced earlier this morning that one notable relic of the band's past, the 1970 documentary film "Let It Be" from director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, will be made available to audiences for the first time in decades. The film will be coming to Disney+ streaming later this May, allowing subscribers a whole new opportunity to catch a rare example of contemporary, on-the-ground art that inadvertently captured some of what led to the group's infamous breakup in 1970. The film hasn't been available on home media since the 1980s, when it was released on VHS and Laserdisc. (Kids, ask your parents.)

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Get ready to party like it's 1962, folks! In a rare example of a streamer actually going out of its way to preserve art history from before the 1990s (if an exclusive streaming release as opposed to physical media counts as "preserving," of course), Disney is doing the exact opposite of (ahem) letting it be. The studio has helped restore a lost 1970 documentary that once gave fans an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look into the group's dynamics at a particularly fraught moment in their rise to fame and glory. According to Disney, the Beatles' Apple Corps production company approached Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production to restore the original 16mm negative of "Let It Be" for this re-release.

Original director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had this to say about the news:

"'One month before ['Let It Be's] release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see 'Let It Be' with sadness in their hearts, thinking, 'I'll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again,' and it very much darkened the perception of the film. But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs? And then you get to the roof, and you see their excitement, camaraderie, and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with the full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter was able to do with 'Get Back,' using all the footage I'd shot 50 years previously."

This restored and remastered version of "Let It Be" debuts exclusively on Disney+ May 8, 2024.