Restored “Let It Be” film released on Disney+ streaming platform

On this day, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film “Let It Be” was released on the Disney+ streaming platform, less than a month after it was announced.

The film had not been officially available since its release on VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc formats in the early 1980s. In 1992, the film was remastered from the original 16mm film negative by Apple Corps, and some footage was included in the 1995 documentary “The Beatles Anthology.” Plans for a DVD release with additional footage to accompany the 2003 release of “Let It Be… Naked” were made, but never realized.

In July 2008, an anonymous industry source informed the Daily Express that, per Apple insiders, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr prevented the DVD release of “Let It Be”. Their concern was the potential impact on the band’s global brand “if the public sees the darker side of the story.“

Despite this, in 2016, Paul talked to Rolling Stone and said that “I keep bringing it up, and everyone goes, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’ The objection should be me. I don’t come off well.“

In September 2018, in an interview with Radio X, Paul McCartney suggested that the “Let It Be” film might be re-released in the near future, with the possibility of including new sequences not in the original theatrical release.

“The Beatles: Get Back,” a documentary directed by Peter Jackson covering the making of the album “Let It Be“, like the “Let It Be” film, was announced on January 30, 2019. It was scheduled to be released in 2020, but due to the covid-19 pandemic, its release got pushed back to August 2021 and then November 2021. Initially considered as a movie to be released in theaters, “The Beatles: Get Back” became a 3-parts documentary series, totalling 6 hours, released on the Disney+ streaming platform. Michael Lindsay-Hogg explained the differences between the two projects in 2023, by describing his film as a “great short story” and Jackson’s docu-series as a “great novel.”

The new version of “Let It Be” was restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post, using the same tools used for “The Beatles: Get Back.”

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