Michael is aiming for a record-breaking opening weekend. It’s also a critical flop.
In a vacuum, the Michael Jackson biopic might sound like a perfectly palatable film. The movie stars Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson as the titular singer, following his childhood through the height of his career in the 1980s with non-stop musical sequences of the King of Pop’s greatest hits.
But Michael Jackson’s legacy is more than just music. Audiences and critics alike are panning Michael for glossing over the dark side of Jackson’s life, proving that it takes more than a famous subject to make a biopic a critical success—even while Jackson’s starpower propels the movie to a box office of $70 million its debut weekend.
The elephant in the room
As initial reviews for Michael roll in, the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score has gone viral: a decidedly rotten 34%.
Many critics are taking issue with the film’s exclusion of Jackson’s 1993 allegations of child abuse, which plagued the last two decades of his life and came to pop culture prominence again with the 2019 docuseries Leaving Neverland. In his only criminal trial in 2005, Jackson was acquitted, but his reputation never recovered. Michael, critics think, might be trying to change that.
“There are scenes that can only be described as whitewashing, sainting Michael Jackson in such a way that it feels explicitly like calculated damage control,” reads Monica Castillo’s review of Michael for AV Club.
Writing for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle said that Michael “slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy.”
But outside of what did or didn’t make the cut from Jackson’s life, critics also say the movie fails on its own merits. “Michael does the impossible: It makes the King of Pop boring,” wrote Siddhant Adlakha for IGN, calling it a “frictionless, flat, paper-thin story that’s so concerned with fidelity to bullet points and recognizable highlights that it robs its characters of soul.”
In other words, it’s bad. Really, really bad.
The film’s defenders point out that the movie’s timeline ends in 1987 before Jackson was ever accused, so it makes sense that the controversy isn’t included in the film—but that’s exactly the problem, its critics contend.
On social media, viewers compared Michael’s framing to ending an O.J. Simpson biopic after he won the Heisman Trophy, a Harvey Weinstein biopic after he nabbed an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, or a Bill Cosby biopic with the success of his sitcom. There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to Jackson’s legacy, and leaving it out with not so much as a nod reads to many viewers as an attempt at reputation rehab.
Left on the cutting room floor
Michael wasn’t always so heavily sanitized. An originally shot third act of the movie would have focused on Jackson’s allegations of child abuse and their impact on his life—but it all had to be scrapped.
Attorneys from the Jackson estate, which produced the movie, noticed after filming that a clause in a settlement with one of Jackson’s accusers, Jordan Chandler, barred the depiction or mention of him in any movie. That led to 22 days of reshoots and a reimagined ending, adding $10 to $15 million to the movie’s already massive budget, according to Variety.
The musical biopic craze continues
Critics can come for Michael all they want, but it’s unlikely to stop the movie from box office domination. It’s currently projected to make $65 million to $70 million in its opening weekend, with some experts predicting the movie will cross the $80 million threshold.
Even the low end of those projections would give Michael the highest-grossing debut for musical biopic of all time, topping 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which earned $51 million in its opening weekend.
Michael is only the latest in a decade-long flurry of musical biopics, kickstarted by the Freddie Mercury-focused Bohemian Rhapsody and continued by a cohort of icons like Elton John in 2019’s Rocketman, Elvis Presley in 2022’s Elvis, Bob Dylan in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, and Bruce Springsteen in last year’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
The movies are by and large crowdpleasers, mixing beloved music with silver-screen spectacle, but Michael exemplifies their biggest issue: simplifying complicated, fascinating figures for the sake of preserving their legacies. Critics may decry the genre as oversatured—but with numbers this massive even for a much-maligned movie like Michael, they’re unlikely to fall out of favor in Hollywood any time soon.