The Beatles: Get Back debuted on Disney+ over the long holiday weekend and whatever you think of the new documentary series the one thing that you can’t say is that it doesn’t truly present The Beatles as they really were. The documentary consists of very long stretches of the Beatles working together, with surprisingly few edits, so you know just how raw a look at the Fab Four you’re really getting. And that includes the language the Beatles use, as it has some profanity you won’t hear elsewhere on Disney+, but The Beatles refused to let Disney edit it out.
Disney has always been the company whose content has been a part of its very identity. There’s a general understanding of what a Disney movie is and while that has changed somewhat over time, Disney products are clearly meant for wide audiences, and there is a line drawn in places where content might shrink that audience. As such, there have been projects planned for Disney+ that have either been moved off the service because they were seen as too adult, or edits have been made to make the content fall in line.
But neither of those things happened with The Beatles: Get Back. Peter Jackson recently told NME that while the House of Mouse wanted to cut some of the language out of the documentary, The Beatles pushed back, insisting that the language stay in, and so it did. Jackson explained...
Disney wanted to remove all the swearing and Ringo, Paul and Olivia [Harrison] said: ‘That’s how we spoke. That’s how we talked. That’s how we want the world to see us.’
It falls in line with some comments that Peter Jackson said to CinemaBlend when we had a chance to speak with him. When it came to The Beatles: Get Back, it was The Beatles, not Disney, who had the final say on how the documentary would be done. The reason Get Back became a three part series and not a feature film is because when The Beatles saw Peter Jackson’s six hour cut, that’s the version they wanted to see get released. And so it was. Instead of being released in theaters the project moved to Disney+.
And thus The Beatles become perhaps the only people on Disney+ to drop F-bombs. It’s a testament to just how big The Beatles really are, not simply that they insisted that the language remain intact, but also that Disney didn’t make the decision to move the documentary to Hulu or do something else with it. Disney likely wanted to use The Beatles to promote Disney+, and decided that even with the content perhaps not being as family friendly as we’re used to seeing, it needed to stay on Disney+.
