From documentaries to biopics, there have been a million and one shows made about the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and his family.
From last year’s award-winning biographical film Elvis, which charted the contentious relationship with his notorious manager Colonel Tom Parker, to the Prime Video docuseries Elvis’ Women, nearly no stone has been left unturned when it comes to recounting the late icon’s fascinating life.
Now, Sofia Coppola’s controversial new film, Priscilla, which is an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s best-selling memoir, is also being added to the mix. The upcoming biopic, which is set to be released in the UK in January, puts the famous couple’s love story under the microscope.
With so much content out there about the legendary singer – from the great to not so great – we’ve picked out what’s worth a watch. Here are some of the best films, docs and TV shows to check out about the singing maestro and his nearest and dearest.
Elvis by the Presleys
Priscilla Presley, her and Elvis’ daughter Lisa Marie (who died in 2023 from a heart attack) and their family and friends sit down to share their memories and anecdotes about the late star in this touching documentary.
For the first time, three generations of the Presley family, including the singer’s granddaughter Riley Keough, whom he never met, get together to publicly discuss the formidable family patriarch. Never before-seen rare documents, including his signing to various record labels, excerpts from concerts, home movies and archive footage, and the tour of the Graceland are seen in more than four hours of footage.
Elvis’ Women
This documentary series released on Prime Video focuses on the young women with whom Elvis had relationships during the 1950s, as he rose to fame – all of whom concur that he was a "mama’s boy", who never recovered from the death of his mother Gladys Presley in 1958 at the height of his career.
Elvis’ Women goes “backstage" to reveal the other side of the man. The 19 women featured in the series were teenagers when they had romantic relationships with Elvis, who was an adult.
One of the women, Jackie Rowland, recalled that she asked her mother to take her to Memphis to meet the rocker and when she met him backstage he made her feel uncomfortable. "He immediately put his arm around me, began nibbling on my earrings, then stuck his tongue in my ear. I was 14, I did not like it," she revealed.
She did insist, however, that he was "not intimidating" and was “never aggressive”. Elvis continues to be loved by these women, who include his nurse, his live-in girlfriends, and fans who are now in their sixties and seventies.
The series also shows the ups and downs of his relationship with his wife Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he met and courted when she was 14 and he was 24, and his search for love after they split in 1975, a few years before his death.
Elvis: That’s the Way It Is
This is the first documentary that Elvis starred in. It charts his return to live performance after a lengthy hiatus in the late Sixties, during which he focused on acting. The concert film, which was released in conjunction with his 12th studio album, That’s the Way It Is (1970), gives an up close and personal view of Presley’s return to live performances and his anxiety and thrill about the comeback.
Elvis
From his rise to fame to his superstardom and his prescription drug-addicted decline, Baz Luhrmann’s BAFTA-winning 2022 film, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, details the icon’s complicated two-decade relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker.
Parker famously had Presley locked into terrible contracts and had him sign on to star and perform in films and shows that were calculated only to pay off Parker’s gambling debts. Priscilla is shown struggling to manage her husband’s increasingly erratic behaviour and his dependence on the pills prescribed by Parker’s chosen doctor.
The King
This 2018 documentary examines Elvis’ ups and downs and juxtaposes them with the rise and fall of the "American dream" according to filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. This movie takes a thorough and contemplative look at what happened to the Rock ‘n’ Roll star and America as a whole.
Priscilla
Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola, promises to tell Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s love story from Priscilla’s perspective and is based on her 1985 autobiography Elvis & Me. The upcoming film will track the actress’s life from when she first met the singer in 1959. It will detail the trials and tribulations they faced as a couple both publicly and privately as Presley’s fame went stratospheric.
The biopic stars Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown) as Priscilla and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi as Elvis.
Between fans questioning whether the movie would gloss over the pair’s problematic age gap and stormy romance, and Elvis’ estate slamming the project as “a horrible college movie”, the buzz around Coppola’s latest project has certainly been at a fever pitch.
