Name: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Genre: Music, Documentary
Released: 2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 98 min
Cast: Elvis Presley, James Burton, John Wilkinson, Charlie Hodge, Jerry Scheff

Baz Luhrmann has done something stranger than another biopic: he has gone back into the vaults and put Elvis Presley back on stage, frame by frame. “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” is neither a dramatization nor a greatest-hits montage. It is a feature-length concert documentary that assembles the King’s own filmed performances into a single, continuous show and projects it at IMAX scale, with no actor and no narrator standing between the audience and the man.

The numbers are the pitch. Luhrmann and his team spent two years inside the archive, sifted more than 2,300 separate items, and pulled roughly 59 hours of rarely seen footage to build a running order of more than 70 songs. Restored and regraded for the largest screens in the room, the film leans on a single promise printed across its own marketing — that Elvis sings and tells his story like never before — with his voice, his band and his stagecraft doing the talking.

That conceit is both the hook and the gamble. Rather than explain Presley from the outside, “EPiC” lets the performances carry the argument, leaning on the players who defined his 1970s touring sound. The TCB Band runs through the footage — guitarist James Burton, bassist Jerry Scheff, pianist Glen D. Hardin and rhythm guitarist John Wilkinson — alongside Charlie Hodge, the harmony singer and stage aide who was rarely far from Presley’s side. Seen together at that scale, they make the case that Elvis the live performer, not Elvis the tabloid figure, is the version worth restoring.

The material itself comes from the jumpsuit era, the Las Vegas residencies and the relentless touring that turned the concert into spectacle. That is the Elvis the film wants on the biggest screen: a performer at full theatrical pitch, sweat and silk and orchestra, captured by cameras that were already trained on him when he was at his commercial peak. By cutting that footage into one arc rather than a chronological survey, “EPiC” treats a career as a single night out, which is a bolder editorial position than a straight retrospective would take.

Luhrmann has been here before, from the opposite direction. His earlier feature “Elvis” dramatized the manager, the money and the slow decline through a lead actor’s performance, and won a wide awards-season audience. “EPiC” inverts that approach: it strips away the screenplay and hands the screen back to the source. A director who once built a fiction around Presley now steps aside for the documentary footage, which reads either as an act of confidence or as a quiet admission that the real thing still outperforms any impersonation.

For all the restoration talk, “EPiC” is an act of editing, not resurrection, and it asks to be watched that way. A continuous concert assembled from years of separate dates is a construction, however seamless the joins; the phrase “in his own voice” describes a curatorial choice as much as a recording. The film also leans away from the harder biography — the exploitation, the health, the isolation — that Luhrmann’s drama foregrounded, trading interrogation for celebration. And its impact is engineered for the largest screen available: much of the awe lives in the scale, and a laptop will not return it.

The rollout has been built around that scale. “EPiC” has opened theatrically across much of the world on an IMAX-led release — distributed by NEON in the United States and by regional partners elsewhere — before widening to standard screens and, in its earliest markets, moving to digital. The strategy treats each territory’s premiere as its own event rather than a simultaneous global drop, which is why the film is still reaching major markets months after its first screenings.

In the United States, “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” opened in IMAX on February 20 before going wide on February 27, and reached digital platforms on June 3.