With some help from the House of Mouse, Peter Jackson’s bringing the Beatles back to movie screens, and this time you won’t have to watch a shitty romantic comedy in order to watch some digitally-enhanced Fab Four moments. That’s right — during the company’s annual shareholders call, which took place on Tuesday, outgoing Disney CEO and current Chairman Bob Iger announced that they’d acquired the rights to Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, a documentary about the recording of Let It Be, using the same pool of footage as the original documentary film.
Variety had plenty more to say about the film, including that the footage will be going through the same restoration process as some of Jackson’s other documentary work. Minus the fluffy quotes from Iger about the restoration process and from the former Beatles themselves (it should be noted that all surviving members of the group and their partners all “enthusiastically support[ed]” the project, there’s some really interesting stuff in there about Jackson’s film, along with a little background about what makes this specific footage so special.
“The film creates a cheerful counter-narrative to the ‘Let It Be’ film, which has a gloomy atmosphere and laid bare many of the internal disputes and arguments that ultimately broke up the Beatles and, unlike virtually every other item in the group’s oeuvre, has been out of circulation for many years — as if the surviving bandmembers didn’t want to deal with it.
Variety viewed a top-secret trailer of “Get Back” earlier this year, and it’s practically a different world: It’s brighter both visually and spiritually, with many, many shots of the Beatles joking around, making fun of each other, singing in silly accents and generally indulging in vintage Moptop hijinks. It also includes additional footage from the group’s legendary 42-minute “rooftop performance” that caps the “Let It Be” film, which was their last live performance.”
Pretty cool, huh? Buried within this news is that the original Let It Be film will see a re-release at some point, and Jackson’s work will offer a differing take on the recording process. The director’s last project, the World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, was a fantastic feat of digital restoration as well as a damn good movie, and we can’t wait to see what he’ll do with this material.
Finally, in case you, like us, process everything through a Simpsons reference, here’s exactly what we thought as soon about as soon as this project was announced.
The Beatles: Get Back will release in the US and Canada on September 4, though it’s unknown whether that means theatrically or on one of Disney’s many streaming services.