{"id":428649,"date":"2026-01-23T19:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T19:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/428649\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T19:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T19:22:08","slug":"every-single-frame-was-sweated-over-how-becoming-led-zeppelin-became-the-biggest-documentary-of-the-year-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/428649\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Every single frame was sweated over\u2019: how Becoming Led Zeppelin became the biggest documentary of the year | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bare-chested swagger, out of control hair, thunderous guitar riffs \u2026 the heroes of 1970s hard rock are back, and burning up the cinema box office. Becoming Led Zeppelin<\/a>, a film about the British band that dominated the music industry in the 1970s, was the most successful feature documentary at the US box office in 2025, taking over $10m<\/a>. (Taylor Swift\u2019s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl<\/a> grossed considerably more, with $34m, but as an album-promoting clipshow it is evidently in a different category.)<\/p>\n

Despite breaking up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin remain one of the world\u2019s bestselling music acts, with estimated sales of over 200m records and 14.9bn streams<\/a>. The band were famously press-shy in their prime, but agreed to take part in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which focuses on their early years up to the release of groundbreaking second album, Led Zeppelin II, in 1969. And contemporary audiences have responded \u2013 especially to the film\u2019s presentation on the giant Imax screens, where it recorded Imax\u2019s best ever opening weekend for a music documentary<\/a> and became the format\u2019s highest-grossing documentary of 2025.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s director, Bernard MacMahon, says that its success is down to more than simply the right band at the right time. \u201cIt\u2019s a story about how four boys that come from nowhere with no access can get to a position where they can communicate with the world \u2013 through really, really, really hard work.\u201d MacMahon says he interviewed more than 170 people associated with Led Zeppelin<\/a> for research purposes \u2013 though only the surviving members, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, speak on screen.<\/p>\n

MacMahon says it was vital to find a way to get through the musicians\u2019 carapace so they \u201care not just telling stories that they\u2019ve told a thousand times\u201d; he did this, he says, by \u201cinundating\u201d them, on camera, with material designed to trigger emotional responses, including audio interviews with Bonham, snippets of which are included in the film.<\/p>\n

The originality of MacMahon\u2019s approach is, says Screen International contributing editor Wendy Mitchell, a key reason the film made such an impact. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a cookie-cutter VH1 Behind the Music-type thing. It\u2019s trying to tell the story of early Led Zeppelin, how they became what they were. Nobody\u2019s ever really done it quite that way before. And it looks good and sounds good, which is very important in a cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitchell adds: \u201cThere\u2019s obviously a built-in audience with Led Zeppelin fans, but you will also be getting teenagers and more casual viewers who are interested in the story \u2013 and who feel the cinema is the one place they can turn off their phones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaleidoscopic \u2026 David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream grossed well in 2022. Photograph: Alamy<\/p>\n

The classic rock era of the 1960s and 70s has in recent years been a particularly rich vein for film-makers, who have found more and more unusual ways into their stories. The Beatles\u2019 Get Back<\/a>, which premiered in 2021, sourced dozens of hours of archived footage from the band\u2019s recording sessions in 1969, while Nick Broomfield concentrated on the relationship between Leonard Cohen and his \u201cmuse\u201d Marianne Ihlen in the 2019 film Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love<\/a>. Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald focused on John Lennon and Yoko Ono\u2019s little-covered early-70s period in New York which culminated in a benefit concert in 1972 in the 2024 film One to One: John & Yoko<\/a>. Baby Driver director Edgar Wright offered an exhaustive, album-by-album profile of eccentric glam rockers Sparks in the 2021 film The Sparks Brothers.<\/a> We are shortly to get Baz Luhrmann\u2019s Elvis Presley performance documentary EPiC, a Fleetwood Mac film by The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart<\/a> director Frank Marshall is in production, and Paul McCartney is about to release Man on the Run, an account of his immediate post-Beatles years as a solo artist and with Wings in the early 1970s. And prior to Becoming Led Zeppelin, arguably the most successful of this mini-wave was Moonage Daydream<\/a>, the kaleidoscopic tribute to David Bowie that was North America\u2019s highest-grossing documentary of 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cinema-first \u2026 director Bernard MacMahon and producer Allison McGourty at the Los Angeles premiere of Becoming Led Zeppelin last January.<\/p>\n

MacMahon, who previously made the successful American Epic TV series<\/a> about early recording artists with his producing partner Allison McGourty, says the Led Zeppelin film\u2019s cinema-first strategy was inspired by Moonage Daydream\u2019s success. It was partly an artistic choice, in keeping with MacMahon\u2019s enthusiasm for and commitment to the cinema experience, but also because, Mitchell\u2019s says, cinemas could \u201ceventise\u201d screenings. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like going to a gig. People would shell out to go and see the band, and they might just go and see the film the same way \u2013 wear their T-shirt and take their buddies.\u201d<\/p>\n

For MacMahon and McGourty, who had worked for years developing and researching the project \u2013 including a triumphant \u201cwork in progress\u201d screening<\/a> at the Venice film festival in 2021 \u2013 the success justified the effort involved. McGourty says: \u201cOne mustn\u2019t underestimate the audience. This is who we\u2019re thinking of every minute in the edit room. We\u2019re aiming for a multi-layered experience that they get more out of each time they watch it.\u201d<\/p>\n

MacMahon adds: \u201cThe whole team worked so hard. Every single frame of that film was sweated over. I mean, every single thing. There\u2019s not a single thing that wasn\u2019t thought about, worked on, reworked and polished and polished and polished. And that audience got that and they could see what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bare-chested swagger, out of control hair, thunderous guitar riffs \u2026 the heroes of 1970s hard rock are back,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-428649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}