The Beatles: Get Back director Peter Jackson says he is trying to convince the film's distribution partners, Disney and Apple, to release an extended cut of his revelatory 2021 documentary series.
As the original three-episode series spans over seven hours in run time, Jackson explained on a recent podcast appearance that both partner companies are understandably wary about releasing an even longer version.
"They say — and they might be quite right — that there's no market anymore for extended cuts. But I know that there's five or six hours of fantastic material that we didn't include, and I don't want it to go back into the vaults for 50 years," Jackson told Kim Masters. "So, let's just that it's a conversation that's happening, but it's not necessarily a definitive one at this point."
Jackson and his company spent years poring over and restoring mostly unused footage from Michael Lindsay-Hogg's original Let It Be film. He admitted in one interview earlier this summer that he "went rogue" and delivered a much longer version of the doc that his partners were expecting.
He told Deadline that the final cut of The Beatles: Get Back was at least an hour-and-a-half longer than what Disney, Apple and The Beatles were expecting. Still, "they never said a word" to him about it.
"I did it because, as a Beatles fan, there was a lot of material where I’d have felt it was wrong from the point of view of musical history for it to go back into the vault," he said. I thought, ‘If there’s not going to be the extended DVD, which I was putting things on one side for, it should go back into the movie.’ That’s what I did.”
Beyond pushing to get his extended cut released, Jackson is ruminating on another Beatles movie that he says is "not really a documentary."