A new film about Michael Jackson’s extraordinary but troubled life is set to open in cinemas. It’s tracking to be very popular – but will it tell the full story?
Bohemian Rhapsody was a troubled production, to put it mildly. The original star, Sacha Baron Cohen, departed and the original director Bryan Singer was fired. But the biopic of Freddie Mercury and Queen went on to make more than $900m (£660m) at the box office and win four Oscars.
Given that success, it seemed logical when the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody, Graham King, revealed in 2019 that he would be making another biopic of a music megastar: Michael Jackson. In short, King was following Queen with the King of Pop.
His new venture, Michael, had one obvious difficulty: Jackson had been accused of child abuse. In 1994, he reached an out-of-court settlement with one of his accusers, Jordan Chandler, and he was acquitted of molesting a 13-year-old boy in a criminal trial in 2005.
Lawyers for the estate of Jackson and its executors, who are among the producers of the biopic, tell the BBC that they “firmly and unequivocally believe in Michael Jackson’s innocence, which was unanimously adjudicated by a jury and supported by extensive evidence”.
All the same, the allegations remain a part of Jackson’s life story, complicating the attempt to turn his life into a nine-figure Hollywood blockbuster. But given current demand for the pop star, it’s likely to be a big hit, too. Industry analysts are predicting that Michael will be even bigger than Bohemian Rhapsody.
If King had any initial doubts about the wisdom of giving Jackson the Bohemian Rhapsody treatment, they may have been allayed by the rise in his popularity since his death of a prescription drug overdose, aged 50, in 2009.
On Spotify, he currently has 64.8 million monthly listeners and 40.5 million followers, making him the streaming service’s 27th biggest artist in the world. His life and music are also the basis of a Cirque du Soleil spectacular, Michael Jackson ONE, which has been running in Las Vegas since 2013, and a Tony-winning jukebox show, MJ The Musical, which has been on Broadway since 2022. The biopic would just be the latest addition to the glittering Michael Jackson industry.
