The Michael Jackson biopic hit $1 billion with critics against it

Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic, started streaming on Starz on Monday, August 10. It arrives having done something no music biopic has done before. It made more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.

That puts it past Bohemian Rhapsody, which had held the record, and past Elvis, Rocketman, Walk the Line and Straight Outta Compton. Worldwide it is also the biggest film Lionsgate has ever released, though at home it sits third behind two Hunger Games titles.

The man playing Jackson is his nephew. Jaafar Jackson, son of Jermaine, plays him from his teenage years onward. Antoine Fuqua directed, John Logan wrote it, and the cast includes Colman Domingo, Miles Teller, Nia Long and Laura Harrier.

The numbers behind the record

Deadline reported the production budget at $200 million before any marketing spend, a figure Forbes has repeated. The tracking site The Numbers lists $155 million. Either way it is far more than the genre has usually cost. Bohemian Rhapsody was made for about $52 million.

It opened in theaters on April 24. The run in the United States and Canada finished on July 23 with $372.3 million in ticket sales. The billion dollar mark came in July, on the global total, after the film had already passed Bohemian Rhapsody in June.

The rollout was compressed. The film reached digital rental and purchase on June 9, while it was still playing in more than 2,600 theaters. It kept selling tickets for another six weeks after that, and landed on a subscription service two months later.

Rated PG-13, it covers a specific slice of the life. It starts with the Jackson Five in the 1960s and ends around the Bad tour in the late 1980s. That is the rise, and it stops well before the decades that made Jackson a contested figure.

Audiences and critics did not agree

The gap between the two verdicts is the most interesting thing about the film's reception. On Rotten Tomatoes the critics' score sits at 38 percent, across 304 reviews. The audience score, drawn from more than 25,000 verified ticket holders, is 97 percent.

A split that wide is rare, and it is not random. It usually means a film is doing something for its audience that reviewers are not measuring. Or it means reviewers are weighing something the audience has decided, deliberately, not to weigh.

With this subject, both readings are available. A film about Jackson that ends in 1988 is a film about the music, and the music is what most of the audience came for.

A sequel is in development

Lionsgate has confirmed a second film. Its film chief, Adam Fogelson, told the studio's quarterly earnings call on August 6 that the company was targeting a production start towards the end of this year or early next. He would not discuss the budget.

The first film ends on a title card that reads HIS story continues, so the plan was not a secret. Fogelson said several big musical sequences shot for the first film are almost certain to be folded into the second one.

That is what the audience is going to want and deserve after the experience we gave them the first time.

The sequel raises the question the first film sidestepped. If Michael covers the rise up to 1988, Michael 2 runs into the 1990s and 2000s, and those years are not mainly about music.

Jackson was accused in 1993 of molesting a 13 year old boy. He denied it, no criminal charges followed, and the civil suit was settled out of court in early 1994. He was charged in 2003 over a different boy, tried in 2005, and acquitted on all counts.

He died in 2009. The allegations have been argued over ever since, most publicly in a 2019 documentary. In February four members of one family, who met Jackson as children in 1984, sued the estate with fresh claims. An estate lawyer denied them and called it a money grab.

None of that is in the first film. The film ends before it, and ScreenRant reports that a legal settlement required the production to leave the accusations out. Whether the second film goes there is the decision Lionsgate has now set up for itself.

Why the record matters to the business

The music biopic has been a reliable studio product for a decade, and a modestly sized one. Bohemian Rhapsody made about $911 million on roughly $52 million. Walk the Line and Rocketman cost less still. The genre worked because it was cheap relative to what it returned.

Michael moves the ceiling. It is the first time anyone has shown the form can clear a billion dollars, and that is a number every studio bidding for music rights now has in front of it.

It also arrives while Lionsgate needs a win. The same call that confirmed the sequel reported a quarterly loss of $28.8 million, or 10 cents a share, against 32 cents a year earlier. The film division posted a record second quarter profit, which the studio credited to Michael.

What to watch next

The first question is whether the Starz run holds. A billion dollar theatrical film landing on a mid sized subscription service is a real test. Either the audience follows the title to wherever it goes, or it stays on the platforms it already pays for and waits.

The second is the estate. The film was made with the cooperation of the Jackson estate, which controls the recordings that make a music biopic work at all. No catalogue, no film. That gives the estate a hold over the sequel that no ordinary rights holder would have, and the sequel is the one covering the contested years.

The third is whether the trick repeats. Michael succeeded partly by choosing where to stop, in 1988, with the music at its peak and the arguments still ahead. A sequel picking up in 1989 does not have that option. It has to cover the part the first film left out.

The number Lionsgate will quote

For now the record stands and it is a round one. One music biopic, one billion dollars, one nephew playing his uncle. Nothing in the genre has come close, and the previous record holder was made for a fraction of the price.

The audience score is the figure that will be doing the work in the next round of meetings. Ninety seven percent of more than 25,000 verified ticket holders rated it highly. Critics landing at 38 percent did not slow it down, and Lionsgate now has the receipts to say so.