The following excerpt comes from MISUNDERSTOOD: Behind the Strange Stories, Controversies, and Clickbait Surrounding Michael Jackson, now available on Amazon.
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The buzz around the new Michael Jackson movie built for years.
At first, all anyone really knew was that the Jackson Estate was involved and also, apparently, Graham King, the producer behind Bohemian Rhapsody. That alone was enough to generate excitement and curiosity. A Michael Jackson biopic had obvious commercial potential. But it also posed challenges no other music biopic had faced at quite the same scale. How could a film possibly contain the Michael Jackson story? How could it represent the genius without flattening the pain, the controversies, the complexity, the mystery? And perhaps most daunting of all: who could possibly play him?
Gradually, the pieces came into focus. The film would be directed by Antoine Fuqua (best known for Training Day and the Equalizer trilogy) and written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan. Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, would play the lead role, a decision that raised eyebrows given he had no previous acting experience.
The cast would also include Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson, Nia Long as Katherine Jackson, and Miles Teller as attorney (and Estate executor) John Branca. Lionsgate would distribute the film domestically, Universal internationally. The reported budget eventually climbed well beyond the already-staggering $150 million range, making Michael not simply another authorized music biopic but one of the biggest gambles in the history of the genre.
From the beginning, the film promised scale. It would recreate the Jackson 5 years, the Motown breakthrough, the Quincy Jones collaborations, the Off the Wall and Thriller eras, the moonwalk, the short films, the concerts, the mythology of a performer who had already turned his own life into "the greatest show on earth." After a decade in which Hollywood had found enormous success with biopics about Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, the question was whether Michael Jackson—still arguably the most famous entertainer in the world—could do what he had so often done in life: go even bigger.
The answer arrived, at least in part, before the movie even hit theaters.
The first teaser trailer became an event. Within twenty-four hours, it had amassed 116.2 million views worldwide, making it the most-watched music biopic trailer launch of all time and the biggest trailer launch in Lionsgate history. Even before opening weekend, the message was clear: whatever critics, skeptics, or industry observers thought about Jackson’s cultural standing, the public had not lost interest. If anything, the appetite was larger than expected.
Still, few predicted what happened next.
Michael opened in April 2026 to extraordinary numbers: $97 million in North America and more than $217 million worldwide in its first weekend.
Those were not merely strong numbers for a music biopic. They were record-breaking numbers for a biopic of any kind. What made the performance even more striking was that the film did not collapse after the initial rush. It continued to expand, both domestically and internationally, as word of mouth spread. By its fourth weekend, it had reclaimed the top spot at the domestic box office and had already crossed $700 million worldwide. Japan, one of Jackson’s most devoted markets, was still to come.
By mid-June, Michael had passed Bohemian Rhapsody to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time. By the end of the month, it had done something even more improbable: it surpassed Oppenheimer to become the highest-grossing biopic in history, with roughly $977 million worldwide and a realistic chance of becoming the first biopic ever to cross the billion-dollar mark.
This was not just a successful movie. It was a cultural event.
The film triggered the largest Michael Jackson renaissance since his death in 2009. His songs surged across streaming platforms. His videos circulated again on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and fan edits. Kids who had not been alive when Jackson died were discovering his hits as if they were new releases. Cars blasted his music. Dance clips multiplied. Old performances were revitalized. Streaming data showed his catalog operating not merely like a legacy act benefiting from nostalgia, but like the catalog of a living pop star.
The numbers were staggering. In the immediate wake of the film’s opening weekend, Jackson’s solo catalog nearly doubled in the United States, jumping 95 percent from the previous weekend. The Jackson 5 surged as well, up 85 percent, as the movie sent audiences back not only to the imperial solo years but to the Motown origins that first made him a star.
Within weeks, the revival had become more than a temporary nostalgia bump. “Billie Jean,” released more than forty-three years earlier, climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200, making it one of the oldest songs ever to top the chart and a startling reminder that Jackson’s signature records could still compete at the center of global pop. It also returned to the top of Spotify’s global chart.
At one point, Jackson had more than a dozen songs moving across global and domestic charts, including major gains for “Beat It,” “Human Nature,” “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” “Rock with You,” and “Thriller.” On the Billboard 200, his albums returned in force. Thriller and Number Ones both reached the top 10, placing two Jackson projects among the most consumed albums in the country more than a decade and a half after his death.
The most surprising revival, however, may have been “Chicago.” Originally released on the 2014 posthumous album Xscape, the track became a viral favorite and surged across social media and streaming platforms, debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 30 and later climbing to No. 26, giving Jackson a new Hot 100 hit in the 2020s. With that entry, he became the first artist in history to place new songs on the Hot 100 in six different decades: the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s.
The MJ revival was not limited to older fans returning to the music of their youth. Younger listeners were coming to theaters in droves and then discovering his work through algorithms, short-form video,playlists, and the contagious excitement of seeing other people discover Jackson in real time. It was a cross-generational reactivation of the catalog, with Michael Jackson once again competing inside the bloodstream of contemporary pop.
This was especially notable in the United States, where many commentators had insisted after Leaving Neverland that Jackson’s brand was permanently damaged, perhaps even culturally unrecoverable. Yet Michael earned hundreds of millions domestically and drew audiences across lines of age, race, gender, and nationality. It did not merely preach to a narrow fan base. It brought families, longtime admirers, casual listeners, skeptics, and younger viewers into theaters. For many, it was less an introduction than a reintroduction: a reminder of the scale of Jackson’s artistry, the magnetism of his performances, and the emotional hold his music still had over global popular culture.
Audience scores reflected that enthusiasm. On Rotten Tomatoes, the verified audience score hovered around 97 percent. CinemaScore audiences gave the film an A-minus. PostTrak audiences were similarly enthusiastic.
By any commercial or audience measure, Michael was a resounding success. It broke records. It revived the catalog. It introduced Jackson to younger listeners. It demonstrated that, nearly two decades after his death and more than thirty years after the first major allegations against him, Michael Jackson remained one of the most powerful cultural figures on earth.
The King of Pop, at least with audiences, had reclaimed his throne.
And yet, one would have had little sense of this triumph from reading the reviews.
The critical response to Michael was brutal. On Rotten Tomatoes, its critics’ score began in disastrous territory and eventually settled well below 40%. The New York Times described the film as “a sanitized, estate-approved fairy tale.” IndieWire called it "glossy, sanitised, and surprisingly dull." The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw dismissed it as “cliched…bland, bowdlerised … and bad.”
Some of the criticism was predictable. Authorized music biopics have long been accused of sanding down rough edges, arranging messy lives into familiar arcs, and substituting performance recreations for psychological depth. Bohemian Rhapsody faced similar complaints. So did Elvis, Rocketman, A Complete Unknown, and many others. The genre is built on a tension between art and brand management, revelation and celebration, biography and jukebox spectacle. Michael was vulnerable to all of those critiques.
But the response to Michael went further.
The reviews were often less about the film itself than a moral indictment of Jackson himself. Slate called it a moral train wreck. The Wall Street Journal claimed the movie “blind(ed) us from the truth,” declaring: “Michael Jackson’s celebrity is so blinding, his music so compelling, that it cloaks him with an almost impenetrable shield from the truth: He was a stone cold pedophile.”
That’s quite an assertion given that Jackson faced an exhaustive criminal trial, multiple FBI raids, and multiple documented extortion attempts—and still has not been found guilty of any crime.
Setting that aside for the moment, it’s a bizarre approach for film criticism. In essence: Jackson was a compromised or even morally indefensible figure; therefore, a movie that celebrated his artistry without centering the allegations was itself compromised or indefensible. The film was judged not only by what it did, but by what critics believed it had an obligation to do.
This was the heart of the backlash. Michael does not cover Jackson’s full life. It ends before the 1993 allegations, largely avoiding the period that has dominated so much public discussion of him since the early 1990s. For many critics, this was not merely a narrative limitation but an ethical failure. They saw the film as an act of estate management, a glossy restoration project designed to introduce Jackson to new audiences while insulating him from the most damaging parts of his story.
There are fair criticisms embedded in that concern. Michael is not a perfect film. It sometimes rushes through complex emotional material. It relies on familiar biopic tropes. Certain supporting characters are underdeveloped. The film’s legal and production constraints are clear in its structure, particularly in the way it ends with the Bad era rather than attempting to grapple with the complex decades that followed.
But it is also clear that Michael was held to a very different standard than many comparable films. Bohemian Rhapsody took enormous liberties with Freddie Mercury’s life and the chronology of Queen’s career. Rocketman turned Elton John’s story into a stylized recovery musical. Elvis filtered Elvis Presley through Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist carnival of image, sound, and myth. A Complete Unknown presented Bob Dylan through a carefully chosen slice of his early career, emphasizing artistic transformation over total biography. Each of these films had flaws. Each also benefited from a critical willingness to evaluate it as cinema, performance, music, myth, and popular entertainment.
For the record, I enjoyed all of these for what they were. Yet none of these were ranked lower than 60% on Rotten Tomatoes as seen below:
Bohemian Rhapsody 60%
Elvis 77%
Rocketman 89%
A Complete Unknown 82%
Michael 39%
Even the minimal praise Michael received came wrapped in caveats, as if acknowledging the electricity of Jaafar Jackson’s performance or the power of the musical sequences required an immediate ethical disclaimer.
The result was a strange critical disconnect. Audiences were responding to what was on screen: the performances, the songs, the story, the family drama, the recreation of iconic moments, the emotional force of watching Jackson’s ascent unfold again. Critics were often responding to what was not on screen: the allegations, the estate’s involvement, the missing later years, the moral impossibility they saw in any celebratory framing of Jackson at all.
The result was what the New York Times described it as “one of the biggest disconnects between reviews and ticket sales in memory.”
In the wake of this massive disconnect, I was contacted by numerous media to ask my thoughts. What did I make of the enormous gulf between audiences and critics?
My response:
This has been the trend, more or less, with everything MJ-related since Thriller became the biggest selling album of all time. Every Jackson project since then, both during his life and after, has been met with critical disdain, if not hostility.
Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic, but I assure you it’s not. I’ve done the research.
Bad: huge critical backlash.
Dangerous: huge critical backlash.
HIStory: huge critical backlash.
This continued until his untimely death in 2009.
There was a limited grace period in the years immediately after he died. But that period closed quickly, particularly after the release of Leaving Neverland in 2019.
So the critical response among cultural gatekeepers, I told inquiring journalists, didn’t surprise me.
What surprised me was how little audiences cared. Audiences, in my opinion, did not deny the complexity. Nor did many of them think the movie represented the “whole story.” They simply refused to let its limitations erase the magic. They accepted it for what it was. They showed up, sang along, streamed the songs, brought their children, watched the performances again, and made Michael the biggest biographical film ever released, surpassing one billion dollars within a few months of its theatrical release.
That, more than any review, became the real story: sixteen years after his death, after years of documentaries, lawsuits, cancellations, reappraisals, defenses, and denunciations, Michael Jackson could still move the world.
