Once it seemed like the original film of Let It Be would be lost forever. It hadn’t been available for 40 years. Now the movie has been restored, and will be streaming on Disney+ starting on May 8th, 2024.
After taking years to restore all the original footage filmed in 1969, producer/director Peter Jackson released the 8-hour award-winning documentary Get Back in 2021. Now Jackson has worked with the original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to complete the restoration of Let It Be.
Interestingly, Lindsay-Hogg asked Jackson to give the restoration a look that appears more like film, instead of the pristine digital look of the documentary. Peter Jackson says the documentary he made leads up to the film, and now the presentation is complete. The biggest fault with the documentary was that we saw all the songs being rehearsed, but only the five rooftop songs were shown in completed form. The Let It Be film will take care of that problem.
The completed songs we missed in Get Back are… “Let It Be”, “Two Of Us”, “I Me Mine”, “The Long And Winding Road” and “For You Blue”. At the time it seemed unthinkable that we didn’t get to see the completed songs, but Jackson and Lindsay-Hogg were probably already planning to rerelease Let It Be. Of course the music in the film has been restored and remixed.
There’s no word as to whether Let It Be will be released in a physical form, such as Blu-Ray disc. So it looks like I’ll have to renew my Disney+ subscription.
Then at some future date there will likely be a “Super Version” that combines the best scenes from Get Back and Let It Be.
Historical Note: The last time Let It Be was released on video:
Those are the two sides of an RCA video disc from 1981. I had the disc, but the whole disc player system wasn’t very good. I did dub all the full-song performances from the disc onto a video tape so we could watch them without searching through the disc. It seems like ancient technology.