A Lost Beatles Documentary Is Coming to Disney+ Next Month

Peter Jackson is bringing more Beatlemania to Disney+. Three years after The Beatles: Get Back premiered on the streaming platform, the lost 1970 Beatles doc Let It Be is hitting Disney+ with Jackson’s help.

Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Let It Be was released in 1970—just a month after The Beatles broke up. The film follows the iconic band as they recorded the eponymous album and features footage of their final performance together as a group. The doc, which hasn’t been seen in over 50 years, was restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production with Lindsay-Hogg’s involvement and arrives on Disney+ next month.

Disney+ hasn’t released a trailer for Let It Be yet, but the original trailer for the 1970 doc is available on YouTube (for now):

In a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Jackson shares his enthusiasm for the restored doc and explains the relationship between Let It Be and his own Beatles film, Get Back:

I’m absolutely thrilled that Michael’s movie, Let It Be, has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades. I was so lucky to have access to Michael’s outtakes for Get Back, and I’ve always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story… The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back, while Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unfailingly helpful and gracious while I made Get Back, and it’s only right that his original movie has the last word…looking and sounding far better than it did in 1970.

Lindsay-Hogg also commented on the release, providing additional historical context and explaining why now is the perfect time for audiences to see it:

Let It Be was ready to go in October/November 1969, but it didn’t come out until April 1970. One month before its 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.

Let It Be hits Disney+ on May 8.

(featured image: Movie Poster Image Art, Getty Images / Disney+)

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Britt Hayes

Britt Hayes (she/her) is an editor, writer, and recovering film critic with over a decade of experience. She has written for The A.V. Club, Birth.Movies.Death, and The Austin Chronicle, and is the former associate editor for ScreenCrush. Britt's work has also been published in Fangoria, TV Guide, and SXSWorld Magazine. She loves film, horror, exhaustively analyzing a theme, and casually dissociating. Her brain is a cursed tomb of pop culture knowledge.