Homecoming (2019 film)

Homecoming (stylized as HΘMΣCΘMING; subtitled: "A Film by Beyoncé") is a 2019 American concert film about American singer Beyoncé and her performance at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, written, directed and executive produced by Beyoncé herself. It premiered on Netflix on April 17, 2019.

The film is being described as an "intimate, in-depth look" of the concert, revealing "the emotional road from creative concept to a cultural movement".

Promotion
On April 3, 2019, it was reported that Beyoncé is working on new music, and also a collaborative project with Netflix which will be tied to her Coachella 2018 performance with additional footage. On April 6, 2019, Netflix officially teased the project by posting on social media with a yellow image with the word “Homecoming” across it, and also the release date of the film. The film's trailer was eventually released on April 8, and was viewed over 16.6 million times across all Netflix social media accounts and Beyoncé's Facebook page in the first 24 hours. Upon the film's release, Beyoncé released a live album entitled Homecoming: The Live Album. Homecoming had 757,000 interactions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter over its first week.

Release
Several historically black colleges and universities had advanced screenings on April 16, including Howard and Texas Southern. Nielsen reported that the film was watched by 1.1 million in the US in its first day, excluding views on mobile devices and computers, which Variety notes may have resulted in a sizeable undercount of views due to the "youth-skewing makeup of the 'Homecoming' viewership." 55% of viewership in the first seven days came from African Americans, higher than any other original streaming series or film tracked by Nielsen to date, ahead of Bird Box, which had 24% African American viewership.

Critical reception
Homecoming received widespread acclaim from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported an 98% approval rating based on 43 reviews and an average score of 9.05/10. The website's critical consensus simply states: "Beychella forever." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 92, based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". This makes Homecoming the most acclaimed television special of all time.

Several publications named Homecoming as one of the greatest concert films of all time, including RogerEbert.com, The Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Refinery29, Chatelaine, The Guardian, and Chicago Sun-Times. Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic called Homecoming "one of Beyoncé’s masterpieces", adding that the film's "combo of well-edited stage spectacle and behind-the-scenes segments—intimate, hard-fought, occasionally tense, politically explicit, personally specific segments—make it a career-defining document." David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote that "Beyoncé managed to fit the whole spectacle into a euphoric, triumphant, and exhaustingly fierce documentary that should help see Beychella enshrined as one of the definitive pop culture events of the century."

Tobi Oredein for Metro describes how Homecoming "reminds us that Beyoncé isn’t just the greatest entertainer of all time, but the most exciting visionary in entertainment today." Andrea Valdez and Angela Watercutter from Wired named Homecoming as a "once-in-a-lifetime performance by one of the world's greatest living artists that our hyperconnected world allows everyone to celebrate together." Danielle Cadet wrote for Refinery29 that the film showcases Beyoncé's "world-class talent and work ethic, proving no one ever has nor ever will do it like she does."

Barrett Holmes of BBC describes the film as "much more than a film about the first black woman to headline the Coachella music festival," saying "through including quotes and audio from black leaders and intellectuals, Homecoming displayed the beauty of black culture, and gave people the chance to celebrate the necessity of black education.....It is a celebration of black American culture with education, specifically Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), serving as the foundation of her message." Judy Berman of Time states that the film "recontextualizes the show in a way that claims the most influential live music event in North America for black culture."

Music
Homecoming: The Live Album was released at the same time as the documentary, with no prior announcement. The album featured 36 live tracks, 2 spoken word interludes and 2 new tracks, an official release of "I Been On" and a cover of Maze's "Before I Let Go".