There is a moment early in EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert when Ronnie Tutt’s drums detonate the opening bars and the polite distance of moviegoing simply collapses. You are no longer watching Elvis — you are in the room with him. That feeling doesn’t let up for 96 minutes. And based on the wave of early reviews rolling in ahead of the film’s IMAX debut on February 20, critics are responding like they just witnessed something they didn’t think was still possible.
To understand why this film matters so much, you have to start with Baz Luhrmann — and with what he did in 2022. His biopic Elvis, starring Austin Butler, earned over $287 million worldwide and introduced Elvis Presley to a generation that had largely inherited him as a Halloween costume and a Vegas punchline. Butler’s performance was so committed and so physically alive that it cracked something open: younger audiences suddenly wanted to know what the real man was like. The film landed eight Academy Award nominations, became one of the most-talked-about movies of that year, and — crucially — sent millions of people to TikTok and Spotify looking for original footage. Luhrmann had sparked a flame, and he clearly wasn’t done.
That TikTok response turned out to be something real and sustained. Over the past few years, Elvis has quietly become one of the most viral artists on the platform. A ten-second clip of him from the 1968 Comeback Special will jump from a niche fan account to millions of views overnight because someone captioned it “imagine your fave having THIS stage presence.” Younger users who clicked once because of a TikTok sound — “Can’t Help Falling in Love” alone has become the backbone of wedding edits, romantic POV videos, and slow-motion fan cams — fell headfirst into the catalog and never came out.
There are now over 41 million posts tagged to Elvis trends on TikTok, with Gen Z reacting to his live performances for the first time with the same stunned energy that filled arenas in 1970. Comments on these videos read like someone discovering a new artist: “How was this real? How was this on television?” The Memphis Flyer noted it directly: “We’ve definitely seen a resurgence in Elvis within pop culture recently,” driven by the combination of Luhrmann’s biopic and social media discovery. What Baz started in a movie theater, the algorithm finished.
Now, four years after that biopic, Luhrmann is back — and this time he has brought the real thing. While researching the 2022 film, he discovered 68 boxes of footage sitting untouched in a Warner Bros. vault, preserved in a Kansas salt mine: 10 professionally shot concerts from Elvis’s Las Vegas residency in 1970 and 1972, unseen since the cameras rolled. He brought the material to Peter Jackson’s restoration team in New Zealand, and the results are staggering. Critics describe the image as so sharp and vividly colored it looks as though it was shot last week. Crucially, Luhrmann has confirmed no AI was used in the restoration process — this is Elvis through a cleaner lens, not a synthetic creation.
Perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful addition—as highlighted by several early reviews—is the film’s narration. Luhrmann’s team reportedly uncovered a previously lost 45-minute audio recording of Elvis speaking candidly about his own life and music. Based on these initial reports, this allows the King to essentially narrate his own story from the stage, providing a vulnerable, first-person perspective that bridges the gap between the performer and the man. The audio, remastered specifically for theater sound systems, lets you hear the full architecture of his voice: the velvet lower register, the sudden gospel thunder, the playful growl — in a way that even his best studio recordings can’t fully capture.
Early reviews call EPiC a “giddying visual and sonic blitz” that plays like one long, euphoric party. Media outlets are saying the IMAX experience is the closest a modern viewer can get to seeing Elvis live. The LA Times praises it as a “dream concert” that makes him feel like a working musician rather than a distant myth. One of the most surprising things early reviewers keep noting is that the film converts non-fans on contact — critics who went in with respect but not devotion came out genuinely moved, the music clicking on a visceral level for the very first time.
According to these early accounts, the setlist stitches the best of those Vegas years into one dream show. Early rockers like “That’s All Right” and “Hound Dog” crackle with looseness; gospel peaks in “How Great Thou Art” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” stretch his voice into the rafters; and a ferocious “Polk Salad Annie” is unanimously flagged by reviewers as the showstopper — raw, funky, and feral. The most talked-about single moment is “Burning Love,” presented with Elvis holding the lyrics on paper, still learning the song, still chasing the thrill of something new. It is strikingly human. The film closes on “Suspicious Minds,” a choice that lands as both triumphant and quietly devastating given everything that came after.
What separates EPiC from every previous Elvis documentary, if the early buzz is anything to go by, is its insistence on showing him as a bandleader, not a monument. Backstage footage shows him joking with musicians, improvising lyrics to make the Sweet Inspirations laugh, and interacting with fans with genuine warmth — including a terminally ill woman on crutches backstage before a show in Albuquerque, whom he did not turn away. These moments don’t undercut the spectacle. They make it mean more. EPiC never smirks at the outrageous costumes or the capes — and because it doesn’t, neither do you.
For longtime fans, this is the big-screen celebration the Vegas years always deserved. For the new generation discovering Elvis through TikTok, it is something even more powerful: proof that behind the merchandise and mythology was a musician of staggering, floor-shaking power. You walk out with ringing ears, tapping feet, and the uncanny feeling that you just saw him — really saw him — live.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert begins its exclusive IMAX engagement on February 20, and opens wide in theaters everywhere on February 27. Rated PG-13. Runtime: approximately 96 minutes.