Out of print for more than 40 years, The Beatles farewell film Let It Be will finally be available to stream via Disney+ on May 8, 2024.
Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and filmed during the band's final days, the 1970 film has been restored and remastered with help from Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production, which produced the 2021 Emmy-winning docuseries, The Beatles: Get Back.
According to the press release, "Let It Be contains footage not featured in the Get Back docuseries, bringing viewers into the studio and onto Apple Corps’ London rooftop in January 1969 as The Beatles, joined by Billy Preston, write and record their GRAMMY Award-winning album Let It Be, with its Academy Award-winning title song, and perform live for the final time as a group."
Let It Be has long been a sought after item, and one of the few remaining documents in the Beatles catalogue that has been commercially unavailable until now. The film has not been in circulation for more than 40 years, after being bootlegged from VHS and Laserdisc in the early 1980s.
Adds Lindsay-Hogg, “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 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.”