The Michael Jackson biopic “Michael” has now crossed $1 billion at the global box office, a milestone that puts it in rare company for a music biopic and rarer company still for one built around a subject as contested as Jackson. That number is going to get reported mostly as a straightforward entertainment win — a studio bet that paid off, a box-office record, a testament to Jackson’s enduring musical genius. I think it deserves a more honest second look, because a billion dollars is also a billion dollars’ worth of audience choosing which version of a complicated man they wanted to spend two hours with.
I’m not going to relitigate the entirety of the allegations against Jackson here — the molestation accusations that shadowed the back half of his career and life, the settlements, the acquittal, the documentaries and counter-documentaries that have argued both sides with real evidence and real gaps for two decades now. That history is publicly available, extensively reported, and genuinely contested in ways a single article can’t resolve. What I’m interested in is narrower and, I’d argue, more useful: what does it mean that a biopic crossed a billion dollars in a cultural moment when audiences are, in theory, more attuned than ever to separating an artist’s work from their personal conduct?
Part of the answer is that “Michael” is, by every account, extraordinary as a piece of filmmaking and musical craft — a legitimate showcase of one of the most talented performers America has ever produced, built by people who clearly understood the assignment technically. Audiences turning out for that in massive numbers isn’t automatically an endorsement of everything Jackson was accused of. Most of the people buying that ticket are there for “Thriller” and the moonwalk and the sheer scale of what he built from a Gary, Indiana childhood most of us can barely imagine, not casting a vote on decades-old allegations.
But I don’t think that fully lets the moment off the hook either. Biopics are not neutral documents. They are, structurally, acts of narrative selection — choices about what gets centered, what gets a five-minute sequence and what gets a single line of dialogue, what earns sympathy and what gets contextualized into forgivability. A billion-dollar box office doesn’t just tell us Jackson’s music still moves people, which was never in doubt. It tells us something about what the studio bet audiences would accept as the frame for engaging with that music, and the bet paid off enormously. That’s worth sitting with rather than waving away, whichever way you land on Jackson himself.
This is a pattern, not a one-off. We’ve watched it with R. Kelly’s catalog streaming numbers even after his convictions, with debates over Woody Allen’s films, with a dozen artists across genres where the audience has to decide, individually and collectively, how much distance they need between the art and the person before they can enjoy one without endorsing the other. I don’t think there’s a universal right answer to that calculation — reasonable people land in genuinely different places, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you the line is obvious. What I am confident about is that a billion-dollar opening deserves more from cultural commentary than a congratulations note. It deserves the question underneath it: what did this film ask us to forgive, minimize, or simply not think about too hard in order to enjoy it, and are we comfortable with the answer.
For my own part, I grew up on Jackson’s music the way most Black kids of a certain generation did — it was inescapable, and it was genuinely great. I can hold that alongside taking the allegations seriously, and I think most audiences buying tickets to “Michael” are doing some version of that same balancing act, whether they’d put it in those terms or not. What I’d push back on is the industry and the press treating a billion-dollar number as a clean, uncomplicated triumph. It’s not clean. It was never going to be clean. The box office record is real. So is everything the film had to navigate around to earn it, and that part of the story deserves at least as much attention as the number itself.