Decades after their breakup, The Beatles continue too captivate audiences worldwide. A remastered edition of The Beatles Anthology is now streaming on Disney+, offering a comprehensive look back at the band’s storied career-complete with newly restored archival footage and previously unreleased material. The series includes a ninth chapter featuring the completion of songs begun by John Lennon before his death, utilizing technology to realize his final musical ideas, and arrives ahead of planned biopics focusing on each member of the group.
The Beatles Anthology (Apple Corps, 2025, remastered) is now available on Disney+. Our verdict: excellent.
The cultural impact of The Beatles continues to resonate decades after their initial breakthrough. More than sixty-five years after the band’s formation, it seems everything that could be said, seen, and heard about the legendary group has already been explored. But that’s not the case. There’s always more to discover.
The premiere of the nine-episode documentary series The Beatles Anthology on Disney+ reignites a flame for the most influential rock band in history, offering a fresh opportunity for both sentimental reflection and aesthetic appreciation.
This new edition of the original home video release includes a ninth chapter recorded after John Lennon’s death, featuring the remaining members – Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr – completing three songs Lennon left unfinished (“Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” and “Now and Then,” which was finally completed in 2023 using artificial intelligence to address technical issues with John’s vocal demo).
Social media quickly ignited with debate following the series’ release: was it necessary? The answer is a resounding yes, unless you’re simply looking for something to criticize.
The Beatles Anthology project is a monumental multimedia retrospective originally released in 1995/1996, encompassing a TV documentary series, a trilogy of double albums featuring unreleased material, outtakes, and alternative versions, and a companion book. The story is narrated by the Beatles themselves, charting their journey from their beginnings to their breakup in 1970.
Since then, the band has released the greatest hits collection 1 (2000), a Cirque du Soleil show – Love (2006) – and a continuous stream of remastered reissues and documentary projects, including the acclaimed The Beatles: Get Back (2021), a deeply immersive look from filmmaker Peter Jackson at the group’s tense recording sessions in early 1969. This constant stream of content demonstrates the enduring appeal of the Fab Four and their continued relevance in popular culture.
British filmmaker Sam Mendes has also announced four biopics (one dedicated to each member of the band) slated for release in 2028, with Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison) already confirmed for their respective roles.
For this fantastic series now streaming on Disney+, all archival material has been thoroughly restored, and the majority of the music has been remixed by Giles Martin, son of the Beatles’ historic producer, George Martin, who passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.
Giles utilized MAL, the machine learning system developed by Peter Jackson’s team in New Zealand, to separate many of the mixed audio sources that plagued the original recordings and reduce the overwhelming roar of the crowd during the Beatles’ famous 1965 Shea Stadium concert in New York.
The band also returned to Shea Stadium in 1966, though Harrison doesn’t recall it, as highlighted in one of the many humorous moments in The Beatles Anthology: “I was in the band, you weren’t,” George quips to director Bob Smeaton. “George, I’ve got the footage,” Smeaton replies. “You know what? I’m still convinced we didn’t play Shea Stadium in 1966,” Harrison retorts, showcasing the quick wit the four Beatles were known for, a trait they repeatedly attribute to their Liverpool roots.
The Beatles began documenting their own history even before their explosion onto the music scene. In 1968, British writer Hunter Davies published The Beatles: The Authorized Biography, a book that underwent some censorship to remove scandalous details from the band’s touring life. Several years later, in 1982, The Compleat Beatles, another documentary produced by MGM, circulated briefly until McCartney purchased the rights to keep it locked away, ensuring that the version of events presented in Anthology would be the definitive one.
The origins of Anthology date back to 1969, when Neil Aspinall, a close friend of the group who later became CEO of Apple Corps, proposed a documentary initially titled The Long and Winding Road. The project was put on hold when the band broke up, but was revived in 1989 with a new title because Harrison objected to using the name of Paul’s famous song from Let It Be (1970).
Ultimately, the Anthology documentary saw the light of day in 1995, making it clear that while it represents an “official” version of the band’s history, it’s also filled with differing perspectives and disparate memories. “We realized that, after all these years, none of us remembered the stories the same way. And this is supposed to be the definitive, authorized one,” McCartney told The New York Times in an interview published that same year. Memories of meeting Elvis Presley or being honored by Queen Elizabeth II, for example, differ among the band members.
What this new version of Anthology, now on Disney+, brings to the table is truly valuable. The Beatles consistently deliver, and this is no exception.
First, it reaffirms that even from the beginning, they were an exceptional band, at times possessing the energy, audacity, and unpretentiousness of punk.
It also provides definitive proof that Ringo was always an extraordinary drummer, a quality that’s more apparent thanks to the “cleaned up” audio that lowers the volume of the hysterical screams that typically dominate recordings of Beatles concerts.
And, above all, it confirms what writer Ian Leslie (author of the excellent book John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs) has said about “the allergy to repetition” of John, Paul, George, and Ringo: “They had an implacable instinct to always look for the new rather than package the old, which here leads them to such an extreme that it puts them in an absurd situation. As a group, they were terrible at making non-musical decisions. They were much better at saying what they didn’t want to do than at organizing sensible plans about what they did want to do. So they ended up trapped. Watching them try to get out of that trap moves us because for the first time we see clearly how fragile their creative entity always was and how much effort they made to stay together.”
The Beatles’ grand plan was to have no plan, as Harrison argues during one of the endless discussions depicted in Get Back and more subtly hinted at in Anthology: “What’s worked best for us has never really been more planned than this,” George says in one of those tense exchanges with his bandmates.
“That statement represents a profound truth about The Beatles,” Leslie also contends. “They moved through the world in a dream and the world became their dream. First they were famous in England, then in America, then everywhere. They recorded albums with sitars, tape loops and children’s songs, dressed up in pastel military uniforms and gave themselves another name, made a wild and sprawling double album with nothing on the cover. And it all worked.”
Things were, are, and will always be that way, as even Judas doubted. As the celebrated producer Rick Rubin aptly put it: “The Beatles are the best argument for the existence of God.” Amen.
