The success of ‘Michael’ is on a crash course with an unwritten rule of biopics: no sequels
In its opening weekend, Antoine Fuqua’s Michael out-earned Oppenheimer to snag the highest-grossing box office debut for a biopic of all time. Starring Michael Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, the film chronicles the childhood and early career of the King of Pop, ending with his Bad tour in 1988.
Its unprecedented $217million debut defied expectations and immediately raised questions about a sequel. At a time when Hollywood seems willing to turn even semi-successful properties into full-blown franchises, this might not come as a surprise, but a follow-up to Michael is not nearly as straightforward as it appears. For one thing, it would be nearly unprecedented for the genre. For another, Jackson’s story raises some unique narrative hurdles.
Despite their historical success at the box office, music biopics rarely get sequels. 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody earned close to $1 billion at the global box office, a threshold that is significantly higher than the usual amount required for an automatic sequel green light. It won four Oscars, too, but there is no talk of making a second film. 2022’s Elvis raked in nearly $300m, but it, too, won’t be getting a sequel. The closest director Baz Luhrmann could get was to release the 2025 documentary follow-up, EPIC.
Most music biopics either try to capture most of a musician’s career, like Bohemian Rhapsody, or focus on a particular period, like A Complete Unknown. In all cases, a tidy story arc is engineered specifically for the film. No life fits perfectly into a Hollywood script, so liberties are taken with chronology, characters, and everything else. As soon as you start to tamper with the timeline and facts for the sake of one narrative, it’s difficult to open the story again to create another contained story arc.
A Complete Unknown is one of the rare instances when one could imagine a sequel, but neither Timothée Chalamet nor director James Mangold have publicly expressed interest in returning to Bob Dylan’s story. Sam Mendes is making a Beatles franchise, of sorts, but by writing and shooting all four films simultaneously, he’s pre-empted the usual problem of having to retroactively rewrite an already rewritten history.
The only obvious example of a music biopic that earned an unplanned sequel was 1968’s Funny Girl, which starred Barbra Streisand as the singer and comedian Fanny Brice. After becoming the highest-grossing film of the year, it was followed up seven years later with Funny Lady, which chronicled a later part of her career and personal life. Streisand went into the sequel kicking and screaming, but was eventually won over by the script. It’s worth noting, however, that Brice was not nearly as famous to contemporary audiences as Jackson, which may have made it easier for the screenwriters to adapt her story as they saw fit.
The circumstances of Michael are significantly more complicated than any of these other examples for a myriad of reasons, including the heavy involvement of his family, the allegations against him of child sex abuse, and the slow personal decline that ended in his premature death in 2009. Initially, Michael was framed by his highly publicised 1993 arrest for his alleged abuse of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. Fuqua had envisioned this episode as the crux of the story, and the script acted as an exoneration. He wanted to show how aggressively the police had searched Jackson, forcing him to strip naked to corroborate Chandler’s description of the star’s body.
The dehumanisation of this lion of pop culture was at the heart of the original story, but Fuqua was forced to do extensive reshoots after Jackson’s estate discovered a clause in the 1993 lawsuit that prevented the event from being portrayed on screen. As a result, Michael is a heavily edited, mostly upbeat version of Jackson’s life that ends before the allegations, placing him at the apex of his fame as a pioneering musical genius. Just before the credits roll, however, a title card reads “His story continues,” suggesting that Lionsgate and the producers (many of whom are Jackson’s family members) already expected to make a sequel.
Those reshoots have hamstrung them, though. Ending the first instalment on the highest note of the star’s career means that the follow-up will have to contend with the messiness that came after. Even if they find a way to rewrite history to categorically exonerate him (in reality, the cases against him either ended in exoneration, were settled out of court, or are still being litigated), they will have to confront his brief first marriage, his “sleepovers” with pre-pubescent boys at Neverland Ranch, his increasingly altered appearance, and his death from a propofol overdose at the age of 50.
Most music biopics are constructed to leave their protagonists on a high note, but Jackson’s life was cut tragically short at a decidedly low moment in his career. Regardless of whether you believe the allegations of child abuse, there is no denying that he suffered mightily from the ravages of fame. The first film was relatively easy to construct by selection and tactful omission, but it will be tougher to create an estate-sanctioned version of his second half that isn’t a tragedy (either for him or the people around him).
The cleanest way forward would be to focus on a hyper-contained professional victory, such as his form-defining Super Bowl halftime performance in 1993. Anything that tries to cover more territory would run headlong into the elephant in the room. Given that a sequel would be almost uncharted territory for the genre anyway, it will either serve as a cautionary tale or set a template.
