POWER TO THE PEOPLE: JOHN & YOKO/PLASTIC ONO BAND WITH ELEPHANT’S MEMORY AND SPECIAL GUESTS – LIVE AT THE ONE TO ONE CONCERT, NEW YORK CITY, 1972
LEGENDARY MADISON SQUARE GARDEN SHOWS
IN CINEMAS WORLDWIDE APRIL 29 & MAY 3
RESTORED, RE-EDITED AND REMIXED
“That Madison Square Garden gig was the best music I enjoyed playing since The Cavern or even Hamburg,” John Lennon told NME in 1972. “It was just the same kind of feeling when The Beatles used to really get into it.”
“The One To One concert was our effort in Grassroots Politics,”
Yoko Ono Lennon wrote in the preface to the Power To The People (Box Set). “It embodied what John and I strongly believed in – Rock for Peace and Enlightenment. And this one in Madison Square Garden turned out to be the last concert John and I did together. Imagine Peace. Peace is Power. Power To The People!”
Tickets On Sale March 20
12 MARCH 2026 (TORONTO, ON) – Trafalgar Releasing is proud to announce POWER TO THE PEOPLE: John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant's Memory and Special Guests – Live at the One To One Concert, New York City, 1972 is coming to big screens worldwide this spring. The film is produced by and released in partnership with Mercury Studios.
Representing the only full-length concerts John Lennon, with Yoko Ono, performed after leaving The Beatles, Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC is a multiscreen concert film of two massive Madison Square Gardenlive shows. This is a film restoration twenty years in the making, with every frame physically and digitally cleaned by hand. This definitive version has been newly restored, re-edited and remixed by the Lennons’ seven-times GRAMMY®-Award winning team, led by Sean Ono Lennon.
Tickets for Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC go on sale Friday, March 20—coinciding with John and Yoko’s 57th wedding anniversary. Fans can visit powertothepeoplefilm.com to purchase tickets. Audio will be in 5.1 Surround or Dolby Atmos® at select locations. Visit the official event website now and sign up for the most current information and event updates.
John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant's Memory and Special Guests performed these now-legendary sold-out One To One concerts on August 30, 1972, to a combined audience of 40,000 people, raising over $1.5M (equivalent to $11.5M in 2026) for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Originally filmed by multi-camera director Steve Gebhardt in 1972, this 2026 version of the concert film is directed by Simon Hilton, edited by Ben Wainwright-Pearce and produced by Peter Worsley and Sean Ono Lennon with a view to creating the film as a multiscreen experience. Music Production is by Sean Ono Lennon; mixed and engineered by Paul Hicks and Sam Gannon.
The audio multitracks were similarly given the ultimate restoration treatment, having been baked and re-transferred at high resolution by Rob Stevens and then digitally restored and remixed in High Definition 192/24 Stereo, 5.1 surround and Dolby Atmos. Hits performed include John’s “New York City,” “Instant Karma!,” “Imagine,” and “Mother,” plus Yoko’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko” and “Open Your Box,” plus rousing renditions of “Come Together” and “Hound Dog,” and the encore “Give Peace a Chance” with special guests including Stevie Wonder, Sha Na Na, Melanie Safka-Schekeryk and many others.
Sean Ono Lennon says: “It was a concert that had a legendary status in my mind, because it was my dad’s last concert. I remember wanting a Les Paul because he played Les Paul during that show. I feel very grateful I got to work on it because he did plan on touring and he didn’t get to, so all we’ve got is this concert. And I think it is very beautiful because it is so unlike what people were doing at the time. Everybody was getting into slicker and slicker stuff in the early ‘70s, and I think my dad was already kind of pre-empting the arrival of punk. He just wanted to go back to basics and be raw and spontaneous and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a very cool thing he was doing that was very against the grain. Maybe not everyone realizes how special it is for me to hear my dad talking or to see him. I grew up with a set number of images and audio clips that everyone’s familiar with. So to come across things that I’ve never seen or heard is really deep for me, because it’s almost like getting more time with my dad.”
“Trafalgar Releasing is honored to bring this significant cultural moment to cinema audiences worldwide,” said Marc Allenby, CEO of Trafalgar Releasing. “This restored, re-edited and remixed multiscreen version of the One To One concerts offers a unique, intimate look at John and Yoko at the height of their activism and musical power. It gives fans a truly special opportunity to celebrate their enduring legacy.”
Will White, SVP Content Sales, Mercury Studios, said, “It's wonderful to bring this concert to the big screen. The show itself is of massive historic importance, and having the opportunity to restore, re-edit and remix the film was a privilege. I think that what we have produced is both visually and audibly stunning, and we can’t wait for audiences to see it in cinemas. To me, it doesn't come bigger.”
On October 10, 2025, the day after John’s 85th birthday, Capitol/UMe released POWER TO THE PEOPLE, a massive 12-disc box set produced by Sean Ono Lennon and his production team, that chronicles and celebrates John & Yoko’s political activism and their early years in New York City. The new film serves as the definitive companion to that collection, arriving at a time of peak anticipation following the box set and the 2025 documentary One To One: John & Yoko, which documented the rehearsals and preparation for these historic MSG shows.
ABOUT JOHN LENNON
John Lennon is arguably the greatest songwriter of his generation. As founder and leader of The Beatles and also as a solo artist, Lennon has won seven GRAMMY® Awards, including two Lifetime Achievement Awards, Five BRIT Awards including two Special Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Music, 21 NME Awards, 15 Ivor Novellos and an Oscar® (Academy Award®). He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Lennon in the Top 5 of the magazine's “100 Greatest Singers Of All Time” list.
johnlennon.com / @johnlennon
ABOUT YOKO ONO
Originally from Tokyo, Yoko Ono was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, where she studied for a year before moving to New York, where she studied writing and music at Sarah Lawrence College. Ono became an influential conceptual and performance artist prior to her marriage and artistic partnership with John Lennon. George Macunias, founder of the Fluxus collective, gave Ono her first solo gallery show in 1961. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Ono worked on music, both solo and in collaboration. The Whitney Museum of American Art presented a retrospective of her work in 1989, as did the Japan Society Gallery in 2000, and the Museum of Modern Art in 2015. She received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Yoko Ono lives and works in New York City.
imaginepeace.com / @yokoono
ABOUT SEAN ONO LENNON
Sean Ono Lennon is the co-writer and executive producer of the Academy Award–winning animated short film War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko. He has won a GRAMMY and an Annie, recorded on over one hundred albums, scored six films, and illustrated and designed several album covers and books. He is a British-Asian-American musician, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, artist, actor and polymath. He is the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and brother to Kyoko Ono and Julian Lennon. He has been a member of Cibo Matto, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, The Claypool Lennon Delirium, Plastic Ono Band and guested with many other bands. He is a prolific songwriter, film score composer and producer and runs independent record label Chimera Music with partner Charlotte Kemp Muhl.
chimeramusic.com / @sean_ono_lennon (Instagram) @seanonolennon (Twitter)
ABOUT SIMON HILTON
Simon Hilton is a GRAMMY Award-winning art director, film director, editor, writer and multidisciplinary creative based in London. He has worked with Yoko Ono for over twenty-three years, managing hers and John Lennon’s multimedia archive, online presences and physical production for Lennon. Since 2016, in collaboration with Yoko and Sean Ono Lennon he has researched, compiled, edited and produced all the Thames and Hudson / John & Yoko books series and the Universal Music / John Lennon (The Ultimate Collection) audio box sets for Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Gimme Some Truth, Mind Games and Power To The People and is currently working on Walls and Bridges, and other music, book, film website and multimedia projects.
ABOUT TRAFALGAR RELEASING
Trafalgar Releasing, the global leader in event cinema distribution, harnesses the power of cinema to bring fans together in more than 15,000 cinemas across 132 countries. A subsidiary of Trafalgar Entertainment, Trafalgar Releasing’s operations include production, acquisition, marketing, and distribution of live or pre-recorded content to cinemas worldwide, led by an international team. Featuring live concerts, music documentaries, world-class opera, award-winning theatre, and more from leading names in entertainment such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, BTS, Metallica, Oasis, Coldplay, Billie Eilish, the Royal Opera House and others, Trafalgar Releasing has repeatedly shattered event cinema box office records, most recently with international distribution for TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR, the highest-grossing concert film of all time. Information about Trafalgar Releasing can be found at www.trafalgar-releasing.com.
ABOUT MERCURY STUDIOS
World Class Music Content. Working with a global network of creatives and artists, Mercury Studios develop, produce, distribute and invest in award-winning content. We are filmmakers in the world of music.
Headquartered in London, with offices in LA and New York, current and recent projects include ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO directed by Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald, GRAMMY-winning, Academy Award and BAFTA award-nominated AMERICAN SYMPHONY, directed by Matthew Heineman for the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions/Netflix, REGGAETON: THE SOUND THAT CONQUERED THE WORLD / NBC Peacock, and IF THESE WALLS COULD SING, directed by Mary McCartney for Disney+.
Mercury Studios also produced and distributed performance capture films ANDREA BOCELLI 30TH: THE CELEBRATION, directed by Sam Wrench (Taylor Swift The Eras Tour) for global Theatrical and TV, BACK TO THE BEGINNING: OZZY’S FINAL BOW, for global Livestream and Theatrical, and QUEEN ROCK MONTREAL for IMAX and Disney+.
In 2025, Mercury Studios also hosted world premieres at the Tribeca Festival for METALLICA SAVED MY LIFE and JUST SING.
Mercury Studios represents the world’s leading catalog of music-related content, consisting of thousands of hours of premium music-driven film and television programming.