Inside the Turbulent Journey of the $200M Michael Jackson Biopic 'Michael'

“Michael,” the star-studded, $200 million biopic of the troubled King of Pop, arrives in theaters this weekend amidst a flurry of pre-release buzz and withering reviews—the Rotten Tomatoes score is currently sitting at 39%.

But more dramatic than anything on screen is the movie’s journey through production, sidestepping controversy, enduring costly reshoots, and finally arriving with a version of the Michael Jackson story free of thorny legal brambles and primed for potential sequels.

As “Michael”—which charts the singer’s career from the Jackson 5 up through his 1988 “Bad” tour—makes perfectly clear, Jackson’s legacy as a man has been eclipsed by his continued sustainability as a brand.

Since his death in 2009, his estate has earned over $3.5 billion, and Sony Music paid $750 million for just half of his publishing and recorded masters catalogue in 2024, valuing the entirety at $1.5 billion.

The bottom line: There’s more at stake than box office with a Michael Jackson biopic.

With the estate’s active involvement in “Michael,” the narrative told in John Logan’s screenplay was controlled by the late singer’s family. With this film, the aim was to retroactively refine it with a story that covered his rise and perseverance through many trials and tribulations—including the sex abuse allegations that went to trial in 2005.

“Sorry media, u don’t get to control the narrative anymore of who Michael Jackson truly was. The public gets to watch this movie…they will decide for themselves.”

That decision was to include the dramatization of Jackson’s trial in 2005 over the allegations and subsequent acquittal, but after filming wrapped, the estate discovered a clause in a settlement with one of the accusers that threw their film into chaos: the accuser couldn’t legally be depicted onscreen.

Director Antoine Fuqua, Logan, and Lionsgate had to reconfigure the film and undertake $15 million of reshoots after scrapping their entire third act.

This was but one of many hurdles the filmmakers had to cross to get “Michael” to the screen, and as the film defies poor reviews and questions about what’s not in the final cut, it’s on track for a massive opening weekend box office.

“You’ve got to give them credit to a degree, they were going to attempt to tell the fuller story.”

A top agent waved off the discussion around what the film gets right or wrong about Michael Jackson:

“Last I checked, it’s tracking to be the biggest musical biopic of all time.”

Producer Graham King secured the rights to a Jackson biopic in 2019. It made perfect sense. King had just produced “Bohemian Rhapsody,” based on the story of British rock band Queen, which was nominated for five Academy Awards and won four, including Best Actor for Rami Malek’s portrayal of Freddie Mercury, and made more than $900 million worldwide. The movie was an antiseptic crowd pleaser, a PG-13-rated all-ages hit that avoided the complicated, messy life