Baz Luhrmann and Elvis Presley are, it seems, forever intertwined.
While speaking with TheWrap on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival about his new documentary “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” which unearths long-lost concert footage from Elvis’ Las Vegas residency, the filmmaker confirmed his long-discussed stage musical adaptation of his 2022 is also formally in the works.
“I don’t know if we’ve announced it, but there’s a stage musical being made of the movie,” he said.
Luhrmann, of course, directed “Elvis,” which starred Austin Butler as the legendary musician and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, the singer’s duplicitous manager. The movie was a huge hit, making more than $288 million worldwide and earning eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Butler).
Now, Luhrmann is back with “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” a documentary feature for which Luhrmann restored lost concert footage of Elvis, along with previously unseen footage from a pair of concert documentaries (1970’s “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is” and 1972’s “Elvis on Tour”). Like Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” “EPiC” will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, including on IMAX screens and other premium formats. The new documentary just debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Luhrmann spoke with Steve Pond about how the Las Vegas residency really was a turning point for the performer – he had so many ambitious, to tour England and Japan. (He never did make it to Japan.) But with Las Vegas, he became trapped.
“We speculate what would have happened had he not been like a bird hitting its head against glass, had he just gone round and round the same circuit. He was not meant to be in Vegas more than once. He was there until the day died,” Luhrmann said.
He started hearing about the lost footage when he was preparing the “Elvis” movie. “The tapes were mythical. No one knew – did they really exist?” Luhrmann said. He had a team go into the salt mines in Kansas where MGM keeps all its negatives. He said the vaults were like “Raids of the Lost Ark” (“I’m not exaggerating”). It was in the mines that he found 35 hours of negative, although there was no magnetic tape, so they had to find secondary sources to create the audio.
Baz Luhrmann, director, producer, “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” at TheWrap’s TIFF 2025 Portrait Studio (Photo by Austin Hargrave for TheWrap)
He worked with Peter Jackson and the team at Park Road, who also helped on some recent Beatles documentaries, to find the appropriate audio. Slowly, the project came together. Sometimes he would mix-and-match audio and video, sometimes he would use an array of assets – “a combination between his original vocal on stage, some recorded vocal, our own orchestrations” – to create what Luhrmann called “a dreamscape.”
But is Luhrmann finally done with Elvis?
He said he is very deep into prep for his upcoming “Joan of Arc” movie, but acknowledges that he and the King are now forever linked.
“I think I now recognize that, better or worse, Elvis is going to be part of my life for the rest of it, in some way or another,” said Luhrmann. The footage in the new documentary, he said, is “the tip of the iceberg, really.” Included in the footage is another entire concert, at Hampton Road, that would take a half-a-million-dollars just to get up and on its feet.
“Somehow we’re inextricably linked,” Luhrmann said.
