IS TRUTH DETERMINED by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, Michael, a new film about pop singer Michael Jackson, intends to exalt the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The movie is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson was.
The film’s release has sparked a civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.
Musically, Jackson was in a class all his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists charted on Billboard and he became a recurring meme online, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 number one singles, countless awards, twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy was also defined by multiple allegations of sexual abuse, an occasionally eccentric personal life, and Jackson’s on-record admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. “This guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,” Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 Emmy-winning HBO documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct, recently told the Hollywood Reporter.
