Queen's 'Budapest' Concert Film Coming to IMAX in October

Queen's Queen Budapest concert film will be released in cinemas and IMAX worldwide beginning Oct. 7 to mark the 40th anniversary of the band's historic 1986 performance.

Sony Music Vision announced the theatrical release Wednesday, saying the film will screen for a limited time in more than 2,000 cinemas across more than 50 territories.

The Budapest concert took place at Népstadion on July 27, 1986, during Queen's Magic Tour. It was the first Western stadium rock concert behind the Iron Curtain, drawing roughly 80,000 fans inside the stadium and an estimated 45,000 more who listened from outside its walls. Queen's performance was later broadcast throughout the Communist Bloc that December, reaching audiences in China, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and it screened in Hungarian theaters on New Year's Day 1987, giving the show an afterlife far beyond the night itself.

The film is also the final filmed Queen live performance featuring Freddie Mercury. The original 35mm footage — shot with 17 cameras across roughly 25 miles of film — has been restored in 4K by Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production, with the audio newly remixed from the original multitrack recordings. Queen played only five more shows after Budapest, closing out the Magic Tour on Aug. 9, 1986, at Knebworth Park.

Brian May said the restoration makes the performance feel as though viewers are present at the concert.

"The image quality is wonderful – you'll feel like you're there," May said. "In IMAX, it is going to be colossal."

May has also described the restored footage as "definitively the most real experience ever of us, Queen, in our glory days," saying he expects audiences to "get lost in it." He has pointed to the concert's emotional weight, too: for a Hungarian crowd long cut off from Western rock, the show carried a charge that went beyond the setlist. Roger Taylor echoed that sentiment, saying the performance was proof that "music really can be a great cause."

The setlist captured in the film includes staples like "We Will Rock You," "We Are the Champions," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," "Under Pressure" and "Bohemian Rhapsody," along with an acoustic arrangement of a Hungarian folk song the band worked into the show for the occasion.

The concert release will also be available on 3LP, 2CD and digital formats Oct. 30, with DVD and Blu-ray editions arriving the same day.