On the 2003 release of Let It Be . . . Naked — Paul McCartney’s remix of the Beatles’ final album — Ringo Starr joked that while the new version might indeed sound better, “Now we’ll have to put up with [McCartney] telling us over and over again, ‘I told you.’”

Half a century removed from the original recording sessions, the Beatles’ estate has now found a new, eight-hour way of saying, “I told you.”

Across Thanksgiving 2021, the Disney+ streaming service launched The Beatles: Get Back, director Peter Jackson’s documentary comprised of fly-on-the-wall footage of the Fab Four hard at work in the studio. Originally shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in January 1969 and assembled from fifty-five hours of film and 140 hours of audio, the footage was first released in the 1970 documentary Let It Be, a dour, eighty-minute account of a band breaking up — which they had, by the time of the film’s release. Jackson’s Get Back is merely the most expensive of the Beatles estate’s revisionist histories of that project, accompanied by an obligatory lavish coffee table book and a five-disc deluxe reissue of the music itself.