A friend took me to see EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert in IMAX. It is hard to imagine a better screen on which to return to the universe of the King, the legendary singer and actor who, nearly fifty years after he died in 1977, still exerts a rare fascination over popular culture.
When Baz Luhrmann finished the ambitious Elvis in 2022, it seemed that his creative journey with Elvis Presley had come to an end. The film, starring Austin Butler, transformed the singer’s story into a dazzling cinematic spectacle and helped reignite global interest in Elvis’s music and legacy. Yet the research process behind that project ended up opening an unexpected door.
While searching for archival material that could enrich the 2022 film, Luhrmann’s team delved into the archives of Warner Bros. There, they made a remarkable discovery: 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm footage, stored for decades in underground vaults carved into salt mines in Kansas. Inside were unused takes and previously unseen material from two key cinematic records of Elvis’s career, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972).
Among the finds was something particularly rare: footage of Elvis performing in the famous “gold jacket” during a 1957 appearance in Hawaii. Portions of this material had never been publicly screened. The problem, however, was that much of the footage had no synchronized audio, requiring an extensive restoration and sound reconstruction process.
Over the next two years, Luhrmann’s team restored the material and matched the images with existing historical audio recordings. During that work, another remarkable discovery emerged: a 45-minute audio recording of Elvis speaking about his own life, a document that helped give the project a far more intimate dimension.
From this process of audiovisual archaeology emerged EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, the documentary released in 2025 and conceived by Luhrmann as a kind of spiritual continuation of his earlier film. According to the director, the goal was not simply to create a traditional concert movie or a conventional documentary portrait. Instead, he wanted to build something hybrid, capable of capturing both Elvis’s explosive presence onstage and the more reflective aspects of his inner life.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and later received a special screening at Graceland in January 2026, marking what would have been Elvis’s 91st birthday. Its theatrical rollout began with an IMAX-exclusive release in February 2026 before expanding to conventional cinemas a week later.
The result and the reaction are nothing short of spectacular. Ultimately, EPiC functions less as a traditional biography and more as a cinematic experience designed to place the viewer directly in front of Elvis’s extraordinary stage presence. By combining restored footage, unseen material, and the singer’s own reflections on his life, the film attempts to capture something that often gets lost in narratives about Elvis: not only the cultural myth, but the human being behind it.
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