‘Every single frame was sweated over’: how Becoming Led Zeppelin became the biggest documentary of the year
Bernard MacMahon’s film about the 70s giants took advantage of audience enthusiasm to make a major impact in cinemas – and it’s just the latest in a string of films about the era of classic rock
Bare-chested swagger, out of control hair, thunderous guitar riffs … the heroes of 1970s hard rock are back, and burning up the cinema box office. Becoming Led Zeppelin, a film about the British band that dominated the music industry in the 1970s, was the most successful feature documentary at the US box office in 2025, taking over $10m, with a worldwide gross of over $16m. (Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl grossed considerably more, with $34m, but as an album-promoting clipshow it is evidently in a different category.)
Despite breaking up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin remain one of the world’s bestselling music acts, with estimated sales of over 200m records and 14.9bn streams. The band were famously press-shy in their prime, but agreed to take part in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which focuses on their early years up to the release of groundbreaking second album, Led Zeppelin II, in 1969. And contemporary audiences have responded – especially to the film’s presentation on the giant Imax screens, where it recorded Imax’s best ever opening weekend for a music documentary and became the format’s highest-grossing documentary of 2025.
The film’s director, Bernard MacMahon, says that its success is down to more than simply the right band at the right time. “It’s a story about how four boys that come from nowhere with no access can get to a position where they can communicate with the world – through really, really, really hard work.” MacMahon says he interviewed more than 170 people associated with Led Zeppelin for research purposes – though only the surviving members, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, speak on screen.
MacMahon says it was vital to find a way to get through the musicians’ carapace so they “are not just telling stories that they’ve told a thousand times”; he did this, he says, by “inundating” them, on camera, with material designed to trigger emotional responses, including audio interviews with Bonham, snippets of which are included in the film.
The originality of MacMahon’s approach is, says Screen International contributing editor Wendy Mitchell, a key reason the film made such an impact. “It’s not just a cookie-cutter VH1 Behind the Music-type thing. It’s trying to tell the story of early Led Zeppelin, how they became what they were. Nobody’s ever really done it quite that way before. And it looks good and sounds good, which is very important in a cinema.”
Mitchell adds: “There’s obviously a built-in audience with Led Zeppelin fans, but you will also be getting teenagers and more casual viewers who are interested in the story – and who feel the cinema is the one place they can turn off their phones.”
The David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream grossed well in 2022.
The classic rock era of the 1960s and 70s has in recent years been a particularly rich vein for film-makers, who have found more and more unusual ways into their stories. The Beatles’ Get Back, which premiered in 2021, sourced dozens of hours of archived footage from the band’s recording sessions in 1969, while Nick Broomfield concentrated on the relationship between Leonard Cohen and his “muse” Marianne Ihlen in the 2019 film Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.
Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald focused on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s little-covered early-70s period in New York which culminated in a benefit concert in 1972 in the 2024 film One to One: John & Yoko. Baby Driver director Edgar Wright offered an exhaustive, album-by-album profile of eccentric glam rockers Sparks in the 2021 film The Sparks Brothers.
We’re u are shortly to get Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley performance documentary EPiC, a Fleetwood Mac film by The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart director Frank Marshall is in production, and Paul McCartney is about to release Man on the Run, an account of his immediate post-Beatles years as a solo artist and with Wings in the early 1970s. And prior to Becoming Led Zeppelin, arguably the most successful of this mini-wave was Moonage Daydream, the kaleidoscopic tribute to David Bowie that was North America’s highest-grossing documentary of 2022.
MacMahon, who previously made the successful American Epic TV series about early recording artists with his producing partner Allison McGourty, says the Led Zeppelin film’s cinema-first strategy was inspired by Moonage Daydream’s success. It was partly an artistic choice, in keeping with MacMahon’s enthusiasm for and commitment to the cinema experience, but also because, as Mitchell says, cinemas could “eventise” screenings.
“It’s almost like going to a gig.
People would shell out to go and see the band, and they might just go and see the film the same way – wear their T-shirt and take their buddies.”
For MacMahon and McGourty, who had worked for years developing and researching the project – including a triumphant “work in progress” screening at the Venice film festival in 2021 – the success justified the effort involved. McGourty says: “One mustn’t underestimate the audience. This is who we’re thinking of every minute in the edit room. We’re aiming for a multi-layered experience that they get more out of each time they watch it.”
MacMahon adds: “The whole team worked so hard. Every single frame of that film was sweated over. I mean, every single thing. There’s not a single thing that wasn’t thought about, worked on, reworked and polished and polished and polished. And that audience got that and they could see what it was.”
