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As adult audiences for non-spectacle theatrical releases have waned post-Covid, one subgenre has survived long enough to feel like a franchise unto itself: the pop musician biopic. Not every new entry is a Bohemian Rhapsody-level smash; some, like the dreary Amy Winehouse biography Back to Black or the misbegotten Whitney Houston movie I Wanna Dance With Somebody, outright flop. But there are still enough success stories like A Complete Unknown ($140m worldwide, eight Oscar nominations) to assure every pantheon pop artist in America will probably receive this treatment eventually.
“Eventually” has become the operative word for Michael, a biopic of the globally revered but controversial pop star Michael Jackson. The film from Antoine Fuqua was supposed to have been released by now; it was originally set to come out in April 2025. After an initial delay to October of this year, it’s now looking likely to shift to sometime in 2026, not least because it has scheduled 22 days of additional shooting in June. Two months after its intended release, it’s going back in front of cameras for nearly enough time to shoot an entirely separate film.
That may be the eventual result, though it’s not the intention of the additional filming this year. The plan now seems to involve reconfiguring Michael into a two-part movie; the new material will be used to expand the first half of the story, which – for “part one”, anyway – will leave off around 1980. That’s before Thriller, before Bad, and well before the 1993 allegations of child abuse, which gave way to a 1994 settlement and a separate trial over child molestation charges in 2005. The movie apparently included scenes with a Jackson accuser whose settlement with his estate included the provision that he not be included in any dramatizations. As is often the case with modern musical biopics, the estate is signing off on the film, and their lack of proper oversight has turned a dramatic decision into a legal problem. Turning one movie into two buys the film-makers more time to figure out how to fix the later stretch of the film so that it’s no longer in breach.
And, hey, maybe it’ll also double the box office – eventually. Another sign of musical biopics leaning into their status as event movies is their apparent willingness to embrace modern-day franchise tropes. Hence an upcoming quartet of Beatles biopics, one for each member of the band, and film-makers turning the Jackson estate’s carelessness into an opportunity to treat his story like a YA fantasy.
The dissonance, of course, comes from the fact that this particular case of eventizing is meant to better address multiple accusations of child abuse against the King of Pop. That these accusations are included at all is surprising and, at first, sounds downright bold for a subgenre that favors legally agreed-upon narratives of questionable veracity. (Even a film as initially electric as Straight Outta Compton eventually settles down into feeling like a mutually beneficial talking points hashed out by lawyers and producers, rather than a story with genuine meaning.) But that’s just it: there’s no chance the ultra-protective (and lucrative) Jackson estate has signed off on a biopic that is anything short of deeply sympathetic to Jackson’s side of this upsetting story. The actor playing Jackson, for example, could hardly be more estate-approved: it’s Jaafar Jackson, the musician’s nephew. Does that sound like a casting choice aiming for an unflinching portrait, or one that indulges the spectacle of allowing Michael Jackson to live again?
A Jackson semi-hagiography that still manages to include child-molestation material – whether treated carefully or with legally actionable cruelty to Jackson’s accusers – seems like a worst-of-both-worlds proposition. It’s notable that some of the biggest recent biopic flops, both financially and creatively, are those that must contend with some degree of tragic, relatively recent history: the early death of Amy Winehouse; the addiction issues that the Whitney Houston movie gracelessly sanitizes. Those films still felt like legally fussed-with estate agreements – like authorized merch, in other words – while also bumming audiences out with the unavoidable sadness at their center.
On top of that, Jackson’s story has that early-death factor alongside accusations far more troubling than the self-destruction of Houston or Winehouse. To unapologetically celebrate Jackson would mean skewing some details of his final decade-plus of life beyond recognition – or simply ignoring much of it. There are signs that Jackson is so beloved, so close to a kind of pop martyrdom, that this is a winning strategy. The success of MJ the Musical, a jukebox accounting of Jackson’s creative process, suggests that there are plenty of people willing to overlook Jackson’s personal demons in favor of a de facto greatest-hits concert. That Broadway show has raked in millions over the past three years, expanding to London and Australia, while conveniently orienting itself in 1992, the year before the first public allegations against Jackson.
Maybe that’s the strategy behind making Michael into a two-part epic. No matter what the second half may bring (and it sounds as if the film-makers may legitimately not know how or if that will pan out), a movie that ends shortly after the release of his solo debut Off the Wall can get away with peddling nostalgia, otherworldly talent, and triumph over adversity. Then a second movie can provide the illusion of due diligence while also selling itself as a sequel to a blockbuster crowd-pleaser. (It’s also not too far removed from the old music-industry scam of counting double albums as two sales instead of one.) On paper, the details of Michael sound like a potential fiasco: an involved but careless estate, a money-sucking repair job, a first-time actor in the lead, and material that tests audiences’ willingness to tolerate in their theme-parky tributes. Yet in reality, it could be a gamechanger in further eroding the boundaries between the art of biography and the business of legacy-making. Jackson changed music history in his lifetime; now he’s being given a chance to change movie-music history from beyond.
