About the song
69 Boxes, 59 Hours: How Baz Luhrmann Resurrected Elvis in EPiC
TORONTO, CANADA – It sounds like something out of a movie: 69 boxes of forgotten film reels, 59 hours of unseen Elvis Presley rehearsals, interviews, and performances hidden away in salt mines for decades. But this isn’t fiction—it’s the extraordinary foundation of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, the new project from visionary director Baz Luhrmann that is now shaking audiences to their core.
The story begins with the discovery of archival reels long assumed lost. Stored deep underground in salt mines designed to preserve fragile material, the boxes contained fragments of Elvis’s golden years—half-finished reels, scratchy audio tapes, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of a man both larger than life and achingly human. Many would have dismissed them as unwatchable. But Luhrmann, fresh from the global success of his 2022 film Elvis, saw a different possibility.
“We didn’t just find footage—we found a resurrection,” Luhrmann explained. His team embarked on a painstaking restoration process, syncing ghostly audio with degraded film until Elvis’s voice and movements were reborn on screen. The result is EPiC, a 96-minute concert film that feels less like an archive and more like time travel.
At its Toronto premiere, the reaction was unlike anything modern cinema has seen. Audience members didn’t just watch the King—they responded to him as if he were alive. Cheers erupted at the sight of Elvis joking with his band during rehearsals. Tears flowed during intimate interviews where he revealed the toll of fame. But the moment that stunned the jury and silenced the crowd was a raw, unfiltered gospel track—a performance so moving, so transcendent, that it drew the kind of reverence usually reserved for sacred spaces.
For fans, gospel had always been Elvis’s deepest musical heartbeat, the place where his soul felt most at home. Hearing him sing it again, fresh from the restored reels, reminded audiences that behind the jumpsuits and screaming crowds stood a man of profound faith and vulnerability.
Critics are already calling EPiC “the closest anyone will ever come to experiencing Elvis live in 1969.” The film captures his Las Vegas comeback era with electrifying precision, but also goes further—offering a private look at the rehearsals, mistakes, and laughter that shaped the performances. “It’s Elvis without the myth,” one reviewer wrote. “And yet, it only makes the myth greater.”
For Luhrmann, the project is not about nostalgia but about connection. “We wanted to show Elvis not as an untouchable icon, but as an artist—flawed, brilliant, and human,” he said. “When audiences rise to their feet, they’re not applauding a ghost. They’re applauding the man who still lives in the music.”
As the film prepares for global release, the buzz only grows louder. Elvis Presley may have left the building in 1977, but thanks to 69 boxes, 59 hours of film, and Baz Luhrmann’s vision, he has walked back on stage—reminding the world that legends don’t die, they rise again.