For decades, Elvis Presley fans knew cameras had captured far more footage than ever reached theaters.
Nobody seemed to know where it had gone.
Then Baz Luhrmann’s team went looking.
While researching his 2022 Elvis movie, Luhrmann sent researchers into Warner Bros.’ film archives stored inside underground salt mines in Kansas.
What they found was extraordinary.
Dozens of boxes containing roughly 59 hours of Elvis footage that had never been publicly seen.
The material had originally been filmed around Elvis’s 1970 Las Vegas performances for Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and his 1972 tours for Elvis on Tour.
Luhrmann initially thought he might use a few pieces in his Austin Butler film.
Instead, the discovery eventually became an entirely separate project:
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.
The footage itself presented a huge problem.
Much of it had no synchronized sound.
So editor Jonathan Redmond and the restoration team spent roughly two years tracking down surviving audio, matching voices and instruments to Elvis’s movements and restoring aging film to modern theatrical quality.
Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production also assisted with the restoration.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert Official Trailer
The archive contained more than performances.
Researchers also uncovered rare audio of Elvis speaking candidly about his own life.
One recording contains around 40 minutes of Elvis talking without cameras running, which filmmaker Baz Luhrmann described as unusually open and unguarded.
That audio became the heart of EPiC.
Instead of using historians or celebrity interviews to explain Elvis, the movie allows Elvis to effectively narrate his own story through old interviews, private recordings and performances.
The material touches on the difference between Elvis the public image and Elvis the man underneath it, including his ambitions, disappointments, loneliness and pressures surrounding his career.
Graceland archivist Angie Marchese also uncovered previously unseen personal Super 8 footage, adding another layer to the archive.
And even after the 96-minute film was finished, most of what was discovered could obviously not fit into the final cut.
That may be the most exciting part for longtime fans.
The team did not discover one forgotten performance.
They discovered hours and hours of complete shows, alternate angles, backstage footage and recordings that had remained unseen for more than half a century.
EPiC only uses a fraction of it.
So even after the movie, a much larger restored Elvis archive still exists.
Nearly 50 years after Elvis died, researchers opened old boxes beneath Kansas and found enough unseen material to let the King step onto the stage all over again.