Michael Jackson Biopic Box Office Tops 'Oppenheimer's' Record

By Conner Tighe

Eight years after Bohemian Rhapsody rewrote the box office rulebook for music biopics, Michael Jackson just rewrote it again. As of this past weekend, Michael crossed $977 million worldwide, officially passing Oppenheimer to become the highest-grossing biographical film of any kind ever released, while also knocking Bohemian Rhapsody off the top of the music-biopic chart specifically. The film isn't even finished rolling out. With Japan still ahead of it, some box office trackers expect Michael to eventually clear $1 billion, making it the first biopic in history to do so.

That's a historic run by any measure. It's also a strange one, because the reviews never caught up to the box office. Here's what's actually driving the numbers, and why the story behind them is more complicated than the headline suggests.

Michael Jackson Biopic Box Office: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

Michael opened to $97 million domestically and $217 million worldwide, the biggest debut a biopic has ever had and well clear of the previous record, set a decade earlier by Straight Outta Compton. What's made the run remarkable since then isn't the opening weekend so much as the staying power: the film has held up week after week with unusually small drop-offs, the kind of pattern that turns a hit into an event. International audiences have done most of the heavy lifting, accounting for more than 60 percent of the total gross, with the UK, France, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia each topping what Bohemian Rhapsody earned in those markets over its entire run.

The result is now Lionsgate's biggest movie ever, ahead of both The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2. For a studio that's spent the last decade leaning on YA franchises, a Michael Jackson biopic just became the thing it's best known for.

A Life Story, Carefully Cropped

Antoine Fuqua's film follows Jackson from the Jackson 5's early Motown years through the 1988 Bad World Tour, with Jaafar Jackson — the singer's real nephew, in his acting debut — playing the title role. That cutoff point isn't incidental. The film ends well before the events that came to define the back half of Jackson's life and public reputation, and that wasn't always the plan.

Earlier drafts reportedly included a dramatized version of the 1993 child molestation allegations against Jackson. Producers later discovered a clause in the original settlement with the accuser that legally barred any depiction or mention of him in film or television, forcing a rewrite and a fresh round of reshoots that pushed the budget toward $200 million, making Michael one of the most expensive biopics ever produced. What resulted is an ending built around the Bad tour rather than the controversy that followed it.

Jackson's daughter, Paris, had no role in shaping the film and has been openly critical of it since, arguing that biopics like this tend to flatten complicated people into flattering narratives, and that her own input on an earlier draft went nowhere. Her aunt Janet declined to participate at all, and siblings Randy and Rebbie don't appear in the film either.

Why Critics and Audiences Are Watching Two Different Movies

Critically, Michael has landed at just 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with the most common complaint being that it plays less like a biography and more like a victory lap set to a killer soundtrack: heavy on the hits, light on anything resembling insight. Audiences clearly don't care. That split isn't new for the genre — Bohemian Rhapsody drew similarly lukewarm reviews and became a generational box office success anyway. If a pattern is forming, it's that music-biopic audiences show up for the music and the spectacle first, and treat narrative nuance as optional.

What Comes After the Hits

A sequel is reportedly already taking shape at Lionsgate, and the obvious question is whether it picks up where this one stopped — the allegations, the later career, the final years — or keeps playing it safe. Given how well the safe version just performed, betting on a tougher follow-up might be optimistic.

Either way, Michael has already proven something Hollywood will be chasing for years: audiences will turn out in force for a polished, greatest-hits version of a complicated icon. Whether that's a tribute to the music or a verdict on how little the story around it actually matters is the more interesting question, and it's not one the box office numbers can answer.