Having been born and raised in the city where the famous “Elvis has left the building” line originated, I’ve long been a fan of the “King of Rock and Roll.” When I heard about EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert landing on the 2026 movie schedule, I made sure to catch Baz Luhrmann’s mind-blowing concert film that serves as a companion piece to his incredible 2022 biopic, and I’m glad I did.
Watching this one-of-a-kind concert experience on an IMAX screen in a theater filled with people who wanted nothing more than to be where they were at that moment is an experience I won’t forget. Blown away by the stunning visuals, body-shaking sound, and dreamlike quality of the concert film, I dug around to see how it all came together. Now I can’t get over how the famed director made it all happen. You’ve got to hear this story…
It All Started When Baz Luhrmann Heard About Lost Recordings In A Salt Mine
All of this started when Baz Luhrmann was finishing the post-production work on Elvis, the 2022 Oscar-nominated movie often remembered for Austin Butler’s star-making performance. As he told Variety in early 2026, the director got a call from longtime collaborator Jonathan Redmond, who heard about a collection of lost reels featuring never-before-seen footage from the MGM Productions of Elvis: That’s the Way and Elvis on Tour.
It turns out, the lost recordings were in a big salt mine in Kansas, most of which were perfectly preserved. After securing enough money to obtain the collection, Luhrmann and his team were in for a big surprise.
So we got the funds, we go looking, and to our surprise, we find 69 boxes. I didn’t go there, but it’s literally in the salt mines in Kansas City where the negatives of the whole MGM collection are kept so that they don’t rot. When the guys find it, they start sending pictures — boxes everywhere, some are mislabeled, some stuff missing, some not. Wow. So we bring it out and we print some of it.
All in all, Luhrmann found himself in possession of 59 hours of footage of the two concert films and a collection of old 8mm film from behind the scenes of the production. However, the work wasn’t done just yet.
Luhrmann And His Team Were Still Missing The Audio, And Went To Extreme Lengths To Find It
Though Baz Luhrmann and his team got hold of nearly 60 hours of footage that would later be turned into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, they only had a fraction of the audio needed to make it happen. The team would ultimately fill in the gaps with Foley artists and new recordings, but they went to extreme lengths (and parking lots) to acquire the vast majority of the audio. When speaking with the New York Times ahead of the film’s debut, Luhrmann revealed how it all came together:
We wired together some audio that’s out there, that’s bootlegged. We had to meet people in car parks and buy it, bless their socks. The trading of illegal Elvis stuff — there’s Colombian drug lords, and then there’s the guys that trade bootlegs, and dude, I think I’d rather work with the Colombian drug lords.
In the aforementioned Variety interview, Luhrmann said the Elvis bootleg industry is “gargantuan,” so his team had no trouble tracking down enough audio to put this dream project together. Still, though, the visionary filmmaker didn’t want to make a traditional concert film or documentary experience…
An Unearthed Interview With The King Himself Led To This Unique Approach
After obtaining all the film and audio and having it restored into 4K quality, Baz Luhrmann was given access to some old home movie footage from the Graceland Museum, which included an audio-only interview Presley gave during the making of Elvis on Tour. This audio, which consists of Presley talking about his life and career, unlocked the key to the project, as the director told the New York Times:
Having read all the books and done so much research on Elvis, we knew his story, so he wasn’t necessarily telling us something we didn’t already know, but hearing him tell it in his own voice was so much more powerful, in a way. And that really kind of unlocked the key to the project. … We’re going to make, like, a dreamscape where Elvis comes to you in your dream and sings and tells your story like never before.
Having already seen EPiC in all its glory on a massive IMAX screen, this “dreamscape” description makes total sense, as the concert film/documentary feels more like a meditation on the man, the myth, the legend, than anything else.
Luhrmann Described EPiC As An ‘Imagined Concert,’ And That’s Honestly The Best Description
Over the years, some iconic concert films like The Band’s The Last Waltz were filmed in a single show, while others like The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense were filmed over the course of multiple performances. EPiC falls into the latter camp, but it’s even more of an extreme than the transformative Talking Heads experience. Instead of one or two shows, Baz Luhrmann’s new concert film features performances from Elvis in Vegas, on tour, and various rehearsals that are spliced together to create something wholly unique.
When speaking with the New York Times, Luhrmann mentioned Peter Jackson’s Get Back docuseries about The Beatles, saying his new movie is the opposite, and is instead an “imagined concert,” adding:
This is the opposite of Get Back in the sense that what makes Get Back so great is that it’s fly-on-the-wall. What I wanted to say was, No, this is an imagined concert, where all these things happen at once.
The best example of this “imagined concert” description comes in the “Polk Salad Annie” portion of EPiC, where Luhrmann cuts back and forth between multiple performances of the same song to create this dizzying and mesmerizing sonic experience unlike anything I’ve seen before.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is now showing in theaters nationwide. If it’s playing near you, especially if the IMAX experience is an option, you’ve got to see this.
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