Michael (Lionsgate, Universal, GK Films, Optimum Productions, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 28) my husband Charles and I went to the Plaza Bonita movie theatre in National City to see the 2026 biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua (an African-American filmmaker who got his start in music videos and whose best-known film is Training Day, though I know him best mostly from his action spectacular Olympus Has Fallen, a 2013 thriller starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent who saved the U.S. President from a dastardly terrorist plot hatched by North Koreans; Fuqua took the job partly on condition that the villains not be from the Middle East, and turned down the sequel, London Has Fallen, when the writers of that one insisted on Middle Eastern bad guys) from a script by John Logan. When I heard that someone was making a biopic of Michael Jackson, my first question was, “Who’s going to play him?” I’ve often joked whenever I’ve seen Bruno Mars perform on an awards show that he seems to be in a continual audition for a Michael Jackson biopic, but in the end Fuqua, Logan, and producer Graham King (a lot of other people are listed in the credits as “producers,” “executive producers,” and whatnot, but it was King who put up most of the money and organized the production) went for an audacious choice. His name is Jaafar Jackson, he’d never acted before, but as the son of Jermaine Jackson and therefore Michael’s nephew he’s a blood Jackson, and I’m not sure whether anyone other than a Jackson relative could have pulled it off. I hadn’t realized until we watched the credit roll at the end of the movie (Charles and I are used to being the only audience members who sit through the closing credits, while everyone else treats the last frames of the movie like the starting gun for a 100-yard dash; this time at least half the audience stayed in the theatre during the credits, partly because they were accompanied by “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” with Michael Jackson in full cry) that King, Fuqua, and Logan had used Michael Jackson’s actual recordings for the soundtrack. So all Jaafar Jackson had to do during the musical selections was lip-synch acceptably and execute the dance moves (which he did spectacularly, almost as well as Michael himself had).

We watched this movie the day after I’d played through the soundtrack CD for the 1988 biopic Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker and with Parker’s own records used for the soundtrack. A lot of sources claim that Charles McPherson was Whitaker’s sax double, but he was only used for the opening heads (the parts where the band plays the theme in unison) and bits where Parker was shown playing unaccompanied. Of course the makers of Bird, including director Clint Eastwood, had a bigger challenge doing that with a man who made his great records between 1945 and 1955 than with someone like Michael Jackson whose recording career began in 1969 and ended in 2001 for all intents and purposes. (Jackson actually died in 2009 but he recorded almost nothing during the last eight years of his life aside from a guest vocal on a song by an artist named Akon.) The movie has inevitably been criticized for ending with Michael Jackson on his solo tour for the Bad album and ignoring the scandals that plagued him during the last two decades of his life, including the allegations of child molestation that have largely overshadowed his legacy. According to a New Yorker profile of director Fuqua, that wasn’t his original intention. He actually planned to include in the movie the famously humiliating medical examination Michael Jackson was forced to undergo at the behest of the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old boy Michael was accused of sexually abusing. The Chandlers were suing Michael civilly instead of seeking a criminal prosecution (which makes me suspect they were really after a multi-million dollar payout, which they got when Michael settled the case for $23 million) and as part of the discovery process they got a court to order the examination to see if Michael’s penis matched Jordan’s description of it.

But, according to New Yorker profiler Kelefa Sanneh, “In 2024, after principal photography on Michael was finished, Fuqua got some shocking news from Graham King. Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family turned out to include an agreement that forbade the estate to participate in depictions of the events around Chandler’s allegation.” Since Michael Jackson’s estate was a co-producer of the film – that was the price for being able to use Michael’s songs and his original recordings of them – “The film that Fuqua had made was essentially unreleasable – not because Fuqua was too critical of Jackson but, in a sense, because he was too eager to defend him,” Sanneh wrote. “Fuqua thought about abandoning the project, but ultimately agreed to reconceive it instead. Even if he couldn’t engage with the accusations, he could still defend Jackson, by reminding audiences of all that he endured during his rise from overworked child star to over-worshipped pop phenomenon.” Fuqua also told Sanneh that he’d like to do a sequel to Michael that would include some of the footage he shot for this one but didn’t get to use because of the legal ukase against it, and that desire was borne out by the end credit, which instead of merely saying “The End” (or nothing at all, which ia hoW all too many modern movies end) said “His Story Continues.” (That’s a reference to one of Michael Jackson’s 1990’s projects: HIStory: Past, Present, and Future: Book 1. That began as a greatest-hits collection for which CBS, Jackson’s label, asked him to record two new songs so people who already had Jackson’s other albums would have a reason to buy it. Instead Jackson recorded a whole new album’s worth of material and HIStory came out as a two-CD set, half old material and half new. For some reason, Sony, the current owners of CBS’s record division, reissued it as a single disc with just the old songs, so the second half of HIStory has become the hardest item of Michael Jackson’s adult career to find.)

Instead what Fuqua came up with was essentially a reworking of Gypsy, the legendary stage musical about the childhood of burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee and her bitch-goddess mother (played by Ethel Merman on stage and Rosalind Russell on film). It’s true that in this incarnation it’s Black brothers instead of white sisters, and instead of a crazy stage mother it’s a crazy stage father, but it’s essentially the same dynamic. And Colman Domingo’s performance as Joe Jackson, Michael’s psycho dad, is one of the great etched-in-acid villain roles of all time. In fact, I remember thinking at the height of the popularity of Thriller in the early 1980’s that Michael Jackson might be a modern-day castrato. In the 18th century boy sopranos were frequently castrated so they wouldn’t go through a normal puberty and would retain their high voices into adulthood. Michael Jackson being a castrato would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a normal sex life with either gender and how he could still sing “I Want You Back,” the Jackson 5’s first record, in the original key or quite close to it. And I thought that crazy dad of his could have been willing to have him castrated, figuring his high voice was his stock in trade. Against that we have the testimony of Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley (which had the trappings of a dynastic marriage to me: the self-proclaimed “King of Pop” married the daughter of the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”), who said their sex life was perfectly normal (to the extent that anything to do with Michael Jackson could have been described as “perfectly normal”).

Though Michael ends rather abruptly with the last show of the Victory tour (while Michael was coming off the best-selling album of new material of all time, a record Thriller still holds, he otherwise inexplicably did a reunion tour with his brothers instead of a solo tour), Michael’s onstage announcement that this will be the last time the Jacksons perform together, his dad’s huge hissy-fit about that and a clip from the Bad tour, at least some audience members will remember the real-life sequel. Jimmy Kimmel’s comical movie critic, Yahya, joked that the film doesn’t show Michael Jackson ending up as a rich, crabby, old white woman living in a deserted amusement park, which is at least sort of what happened to him in real life. One thing that I give Fuqua and his cinematographer, Dion Beebe, credit for is shooting virtually the entire film in neon-bright colors instead of relegating it all to the dirty browns and greens that predominate in most modern films. That’s a look that’s annoying enough with a film where the protagonists are white but it’s even worse when they’re Black: the actors’ brown skins tend to blend in with the brown backgrounds and turn everything to murk. It’s true that Fuqua and Beebe were virtually forced to do that; everyone who’d seen a Michael Jackson video would be expecting the rich, vibrant colors with which they were filmed (on 35 mm film rather than video because Jackson insisted he wanted the better image quality; it’s why he called his videos “short films,” which writer John Logan got right in the script for Michael). Michael is an overwhelming movie that should be seen by virtually anybody who remembers the pop culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and because of the lawyers’ edicts I’m O.K. with it leaving out the rest of Michael Jackson’s sorry story.

When I posted about HIStory on Film: Volume II, the video compilation released in 1997 in tandem with the HIStory two-CD set, I wrote about the Michael Jackson enigma (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-jackson-history-on-film-volume.html): “[T]he portrait we get from it is of Michael Jackson the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It’s why Michael Jackson remains endlessly fascinating despite the scandals that threatened to unravel his career when he died; as Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “[I]t’s much harder to stop listening to Jackson’s songs than it is to stop watching Woody Allen’s films or The Cosby Show. Part of the problem is that his influence is so huge; the Canadian singer known as the Weeknd has become one of the most popular performers in the world with his moody, artful update of Jackson’s music. On Broadway, MJ the Musical has been running for more than four years, encouraging theatregoers to let their love of Jackson’s hits outweigh concerns about his life. And, though his songs have been mainly absent from television ads, the animated film The Bad Guys 2 used “Bad” in a trailer last year. The legal fights aren’t over; a case against Jackson’s estate, filed by the two primary accusers from Leaving Neverland, is scheduled to go to trial this fall. But it has now been more than fifteen years since Jackson’s death, and the public outrage seems to be fading, perhaps because Jackson is increasingly viewed as a troubled figure from the past, rather than a troublesome figure in the present.”

I was annoyed by a few omissions and mistakes in the film; they had the group billed as “The Jackson 5” while they’re still kids in Gary, Indiana (it was actually either Suzanne DePasse or someone else from Motown who had the idea to change the group’s name from “The Jackson Five” to the version with the numeral); they had Off the Wall, Michael Jackson’s first solo album for Epic Records, be his first solo recording (in fact Michael had recorded four solo albums at Motown); and not only is Janet Jackson not in the dramatis personae (at her own insistence; she refused to allow herself to be portrayed and after the film came out issued a press statement blasting its alleged inaccuracies, which seemed to me to be trying to have it both ways), neither is Diana Ross. It was actually Ross who first scouted the Jacksons and brought them to Motown, and their first album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. I’d also have liked to see more scenes of Michael and Quincy Jones actually in the studio together working out the febrile dance grooves that made Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad such great hits; as it is, all we see is Michael adding his final vocals to already pre-recorded tapes. I did like the way they portrayed the famous accident that happened to Michael Jackson in 1984, in which he received third-degree burns on his scalp while filming a commercial for Pepsi-Cola and as a result developed an addiction to painkillers that lasted the rest of his life. And I remember reading a review of a biography of 1940’s and 1950’s opera star Jussi Björling and being struck by the similarities between his life and Michael Jackson’s: both started their careers as children in singing groups with their brothers, both were known for high-lying lyrical voices, both had major addiction issues (Björling to alcohol and Jackson to prescription drugs), and both died at age 49. As we were leaving the theatre I pronounced Michael the movie as “overwhelming,” and Charles agreed – though he’d also found it “overwhelming” in a quite different way, put off by the ear-splitting volume of the IMAX presentation we had watched.