Critics panned the Michael Jackson biopic, and it still made a billion dollars
Michael, the 2026 film about Michael Jackson's rise, drew mostly bad reviews. Critics liked the lead but called the story sanitised. Audiences ignored them. It earned 1.029 billion dollars worldwide, becoming the first biographical film ever to pass a billion and the biggest hit Lionsgate has had.
The lead role went to Jaafar Jackson, Michael's nephew, in his first film, after a two-year search; his grandmother Katherine Jackson said he embodied her son. Juliano Valdi, also a newcomer, played Michael as a child. Antoine Fuqua directed from a script by John Logan, with Colman Domingo as the domineering father Joseph, Nia Long as Katherine and Mike Myers as the CBS Records boss Walter Yetnikoff. The producer Graham King said he interviewed hundreds of people who knew the singer.
The story runs from 1966, when Joseph forms the Jackson 5 in Gary, Indiana, to the Bad World Tour in 1988. Along the way it shows Motown signing the brothers, Michael's adult solo debut with Quincy Jones, and his decision to fire his father as manager, by fax. It dramatises the making of Beat It with members of rival Los Angeles gangs, the pressure on MTV to play videos by a black artist, and the Pepsi commercial in which pyrotechnics set his hair on fire.
Getting it made was expensive and tangled. The 2023 actors' strike delayed filming until the first half of 2024. Earlier drafts opened in 1993, when the first child abuse allegations against Jackson surfaced, but a clause in a legal settlement barred references to them, so the final act was rewritten and reshot in June 2025. The budget ended up somewhere between 155 and 200 million dollars. The director of the documentary Leaving Neverland accused the script of distortions, and one cameo, Kat Graham's Diana Ross, was cut for legal reasons.
It premiered in Berlin in April 2026 and opened in British and American cinemas within the following two weeks. Beyond breaking the record for a biopic, it ranked as the fourth-highest grossing release of 2026, and a sequel is being developed.
Source: Michael (2026 film)
