After a theatrical release in 2024, Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers Beach Party is coming to Paramount+. The Cameron Crowe-directed project will be available to stream on the service starting on March 11. Filmed around the time of Petty’s album Long After Dark, the project originally aired on MTV in 1983 before being largely forgotten about.
“’Heartbreakers Beach Party’ occupies a special place in my heart,” Crowe said in a statement with the announcement, per Variety. “Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers leaned into the making of the film with a kind of hilarious music-filled honesty that still feels fresh forty years later. It was also my first experience as a director. Thanks to Adria Petty and the Petty estate, along with our co-filmmakers Danny Bramson, Phil Savenick, Doug Dowdle and Greg Mariotti, we’re bringing it back in all its reckless glory. I’m especially happy to add a postscript with the never-seen outtake footage I always treasured. The fact that the original film was yanked from MTV after only one airing shows that it was, and still is, an outlandish feast for fans in the best ways. Turn it up!!”
Filmed in 1982 and 1983 and lost for decades, the 16mm print of Heartbreakers Beach Party was discovered in 2024 and restored to include 19 minutes of extra footage, including outtakes and an interview with Petty’s daughter Adria Petty. It enjoyed a theatrical release last October as a deluxe reissue of his 1982 album Long After Dark hit shelves with new bonus tracks.
Adria is actively involved with much of the archival work of her father, and brought the tapes to Crow after finding them in the vault. “We have this great archivist that’s been testing film for vinegar syndrome, and she found a bunch of the raw film reels for “Heartbreakers Beach Party,” which we didn’t realize we had in our possession. They weren’t labeled,” she told Variety. “And we found an incredible trove of unreleased material and important material, of songs he had written for other people and things like that during that time, and it felt like a really good and fun thing to work on.”
Order the deluxe edition of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ Long After Dark now.
