Michael Jackson fans dance in the aisles as singer’s biopic smashes box-office records

[LOS ANGELES] They came in their sequined gloves and shiny loafers, their black fedoras and red leather jackets. They danced in the aisles and sang the hits at the top of their lungs. They moonwalked, kicked their legs and leaned like smooth criminals. They let bygones be bygones.

Critics have largely savaged Michael, the biopic of Michael Jackson that opened on Friday (Apr 24) in theatres across the globe. One dismissed it as a “bland and barely competent daytime TV movie”; another as not a movie at all but a “filmed playlist in search of a story”. Yet to the legions of Jackson’s fans, the glossy film was just cause to celebrate the greatest pop star of all time.

Over the past few days, Jackson fans turned their local theatres into makeshift concert halls. Admirers broke out into dance at a showing in London. Others shimmied and spun in the aisles in Atlanta.

Countless fans dressed up as Jackson, including Grace Acosta, 35, who could not contain her excitement as she rushed into a movie theatre in the Union Square neighbourhood of New York City’s Manhattan borough on Sunday, sporting a red Thriller jacket and matching pants.

“No one will ever compare to Michael Jackson,” she said as she dismissed talk of the allegations that have trailed the singer for years. “I believe that Michael Jackson never did something like that.”

Indeed, much of the criticism of the film, which the Jackson estate approved, has come from the fact that its story ends in 1988, to many people a too-convenient sidestepping of the accusations of child sexual abuse that later emerged (including as recently as this year). Yet, as Adam Fogelson, the chair of Lionsgate, the studio that made the film, said in a recent statement: “If you give audiences what they want, they will come.”

Audiences more than showed up for the film’s opening weekend. The movie was on pace to earn more than US$217 million worldwide in those initial three days. In the US and Canada, it raked in an estimated US$97 million, beating the record of US$82.4 million for a biopic set by Oppenheimer in 2023, even when adjusted for inflation.

Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, recounts roughly the first three decades of Jackson’s life, including his childhood in Gary, Indiana, and his time performing with his brothers as part of the Jackson 5. His nephew Jaafar Jackson, the son of Jermaine Jackson, portrays him in the movie, and most of Michael Jackson’s siblings are executive producers.

But a few, including Janet Jackson, who is not even a character in the film, are not. Clearly, some family members disagree that a more acceptable version of the singer’s story (the film also omits Jackson’s struggles with scalp surgery after enduring third-degree burns while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984 and his subsequent addiction to painkillers) was the right move.

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Jackson’s daughter, Paris, said in an Instagram story last year that Michael contained not only inaccuracies but “full-blown lies”. The film, she said, “panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in a fantasy.”

The filmmakers had, in fact, planned to depict accusations of sexual molestation from a 13-year-old boy, claims made in a lawsuit that Jackson settled for more than US$20 million in 1994 (while denying any wrongdoing). But then lawyers from Jackson’s estate realised that the settlement’s terms prohibited the publicising of those events. A substantial portion of the film was scrapped and reworked.

Fans appeared thrilled, or at least unbothered, by the final version. One wrote on social media that Michael was “a small love letter” to the singer. Critics are seething, she said, because they “wanted this film to be tragic and sad”.

In the lobby of the Union Square theatre, where Jackson’s music was pumping, Necia Blanc, said she, too, was unconcerned that the film avoided the allegations against Jackson.

“I think they should save those type of subjects, that subject matter, for a documentary,” said Blanc, who declined to give her age. “Documentaries are based on fact, and a film is for entertainment.”

The blunder concerning the 1994 settlement may end up giving fans more Jackson entertainment. A spokesperson for Lionsgate said that the need to revise the movie meant an opportunity to tell more of Jackson’s life in a subsequent film, or films. A closing title card in Michael reads: “His story continues.”

Either way, the throngs of fans who saw Michael this past weekend seemed very much in the here and now.

Jennifer Guillaume, 44, saw the movie in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, where, she said, the audience was eager to sing along to the many songs it features. Those people included her children and her mother, whom she had to tell more than once: “Mom, this is not a concert.”

Guillaume admired the film’s sympathetic portrait of the King of Pop. “He was a superstar, but he was just like us,” she felt. “He was a human being. He loved.”

With her voice full of anticipation, she added: “I’m going to see it again on Tuesday!” NYTIMES