The Beatles Anthology 2025 is available on Disney+ now.

Fans of the Beatles have been well enabled by Disney+ since it launched in 2019 with a steady release of exclusive Fab Four documentaries, including Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back (2021), Let It Be - Restored (2024), Beatles ’64 (2025), and now the remastered The Beatles Anthology 2025.

It’s staggering to consider that it’s been 30 years since the ABC network first broadcast the original eight episodes of The Beatles Anthology in the US as a three-night event. Directed by Geoff Wonfor and Bob Smeaton, the series marked the first time that the surviving Beatles — Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — and Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon (representing the late John Lennon estate) worked together to tell their story in their own words. The docuseries also utilized the massive collection of unused Beatles footage curated and cataloged in 1971 by Neil Aspinall, their longtime friend and manager of Apple Corps, and their own individual personal archives. The result was an exhaustive, insightful, and very personal record of their shared history, starting from their childhoods in Liverpool through to the dissolution of the band in 1969.

While that iteration of The Beatles Anthology was accepted as the definitive source for the band’s history, it was limited by what could be accomplished with the video and audio mastering of the time, as well as broadcast standards in 1995 (HDTV wouldn’t be introduced until 1998). With this updated version, not only is a worthy ninth episode added to the whole, but the overall footage restoration and upscaling is pristinely done by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films & Park Road Post, who were responsible for the Beatles: Get Back and Let It Be restorations. That’s matched by the stellar audio remastering and remixing by Giles Martin, son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin. He utilized ‘MAL’ AI de-mixing technology to do what good AI does, achieving digital separation of audio layers to get maximum clarity with voice, instruments, and background noise. That means crisp song fidelity throughout the new episode, as well as in Lennon’s voice in the “new” Beatles songs that came from this project.

Even if you aren’t a Beatles fan, the Anthology series stands apart from most band docs because of its contextual value as a historical time capsule of the post-war global music scene. Told primarily through interviews recorded from 1991-1994 with the surviving members, and using archival interviews of Lennon, the docuseries isn’t concerned with how the outside world perceived them. This was their opportunity to reflect on the magic of their intersected lives, how they applied their working class values of non-stop gigging to evolve into a cracking little band, and their remembrances of how they weathered the global obsession of them and their music that started with "Please Please Me" in 1963 and never really stopped.

The only new material in The Beatles Anthology 2025 comes in episode nine, which is a more formal edit of the special features footage from the extras disc on the original Anthology’s DVD box set, and some unused material from the original edit. Director Oliver Murray (Now and Then - The Last Beatles Song) takes his storytelling cues from Peter Jackson and allows the band’s candid moments to speak volumes about band dynamics, from their waning days right up through the sessions for the doc in the early ’90s. Murray also constructs a timeline for the creation process behind the Lennon demos that inspired their creation of "Free as a Bird," "Real Love," and what eventually would become 2023’s "Now and Then.” As they relearn to create in a space together, there’s a lot of joy in just witnessing them collaborating and writing as a unit again. There’s warmth, rapport, and truth that blooms before our eyes, and it’s emotional to watch.

In keeping with that, episodes one through eight remain a fascinating watch, not only because of the documentation of their meteoric rise, but because of how distance from “The Beatles” informs the unique mood each brings to the interviews that assess their memories of that crazy decade of their lives. While the great Beatles experiment only lasted a decade, the music they made and the accelerated rate in which they matured musically remains singular to modern pop music. In turn, they inspired countless musicians that came after, while continuing their own musical journeys. Not many bands hit a pinnacle of success like the Beatles did, then get to reunite to set the record straight while still wrestling with their legacy in real time on camera. The Anthology remains infinitely watchable because it’s not just documenting a timeline; it captures the evolving, complicated relationships of its existing members, who on one hand can be united in mourning the loss of Lennon, yet still bristle with their memories of one another.

There’s also the journey of the viewer. If you’ve watched Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back and Let It Be - Restored, and then rewatch The Beatles Anthology 2025 or watch it for the first time, together they present the clearest picture of each man’s patience and enthusiasm for the Beatles over time. McCartney and Starr have obviously had the benefit of more years on the planet than Lennon or Harrison were afforded and there is the mellowing that inherently comes with time. But those three projects, when watched together, do an extraordinary job of capturing the journey of what they all weathered personally and professionally, good and bad, and the choices they made to make peace with their Beatles legacy. As George Harrison says so sagely in closing, "The Beatles live in a different universe, regardless whether we're around or not. It's no longer us, it's whatever anyone takes from it." It’s especially bittersweet to have him acknowledge that truth when only six years later, he too would be gone… but that just reinforces what an incredible project this remains.