New Elvis Concert Movie's RT Audience Score Is Even Bigger Than Tom Hanks' Oscar-Nominated Biopic

2 weeks ago 14

Tom Hanks at Cannes with a sunny background

Published Feb 22, 2026, 9:52 AM EST

Brennan Klein (he/him) is a senior news writer at Screen Rant, host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast, and contributor at Alternate Ending and Horror Press. He has been writing and podcasting about pop culture (especially horror movies) for over a decade at platforms including Blumhouse, Fangoria, Dread Central, The Backlot, and Arrow in the Head.

Audiences can't help falling in love with EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.

The project, which is part concert movie and part documentary, is composed of previously unseen footage of the iconic singer that was compiled by director Baz Luhrmann from his research materials for his 2022 biopic Elvis. That movie, which starred Austin Butler in the title role, was a critical and commercial hit, grossing $288.7 million against its reported $85 million budget and going on to be nominated for eight Oscars.

Now that EPiC is running in theaters, Rotten Tomatoes has aggregated enough verified user reviews for EPiC to earn an official audience score on the Popcornmeter. While the score could fluctuate as more reviews are added, at the time of writing, it has a near-perfect Popcornmeter score of 99%. If it maintains this level of audience enthusiasm as the number of reviews rises, it will become Verified Hot on the platform.

It is so far audiences' highest-rated movie of the weekend, beating out the Popcornmeter scores of fellow new releases, including the MercyMe biopic sequel I Can Only Imagine 2 (which is close at 98%), the serial killer thriller Psycho Killer (35%) and Glen Powell's dark comedy How to Make a Killing (76%).

Its 99% score is also enough for it to dominate the stellar 94% score of 2022's Elvis, which is Verified Hot on Rotten Tomatoes and marks the second-best Popcornmeter score ever for Austin Butler (behind Dune: Part Two), the fourth-best for Tom Hanks, who played Colonel Tom Parker (behind Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, and A Man Called Otto), and the best for Baz Luhrmann before EPiC debuted.

In addition to the overall score for EPiC handily beating the Tom Hanks movie, the individual scores from audience reviews are spectacular. In fact, 27 of the 28 reviews posted in the 12 hours prior to the time of writing give the movie five stars out of five, and the outlier gives it four stars.

The majority of the other user reviews (of which there are more than 250) also give the documentary five stars. This level of enthusiasm indicates that EPiC is very likely to be Verified Hot sooner rather than later.

These glowing reviews for EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert are also translating to a strong box office performance. The movie is only playing in 325 domestic theaters during its premiere week before expanding, but it is projected to debut at No. 7 on the domestic chart thanks to a solid per-screen average of $9,600.