At this point, the biggest risk of 2025 might just be “Michael,” the long-gestating Michael Jackson biopic that’s been through more behind-the-scenes chaos than Lionsgate would care to admit.
Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan were forced to completely rethink the film after a rights dispute involving one of Jackson’s former molestation accusers rendered a large chunk of already-shot material legally unusable. This has led to potentially only half the film being released next year.
Here’s Puck’s Matt Belloni reporting that reshoots quietly wrapped last month, and the finished cut now ends with Jackson’s meteoric rise to superstardom in the 1980s—meaning everything that came after, including his implosion and the dark shadow of Neverland, is out. That’s despite two full weeks of footage filmed at Neverland Ranch. All of it? Scrapped.
Producer Graham King isn’t giving up.
He already has plans for a follow-up film that would tackle Jackson’s “King of Pop” years, with new material featuring Jaafar Jackson (Michael’s nephew, playing the man himself), Colman Domingo, and Miles Teller. The catch? The sequel only happens if “Michael” becomes a hit with audiences when it opens next April. If it lands big, or even shows strong early tracking, they’ll move forward. If not, all that extra footage goes straight to the vault, a waste of money, and the Jackson estate, which has been covering the costs of this production fiasco, eats the loss.
Earlier in the year, when things looked a little rosier for “Michael,” Fuqua reportedly had a cut running nearly four hours long, which Lionsgate had planned to split into two parts. The goal was to turn it into an “event” film, something on the scale of “Wicked.” Now? That latter half—roughly two hours of footage—might never see the light of day.
Lionsgate, which is handling domestic distribution, and Universal, managing the international rollout, are still betting hard on this one. After many delays, the first trailer for “Michael” will drop in November, attached to “Wicked: For Good.” How that trailer plays with audiences will tell us a lot about whether this project has an audience.
So yes, “Michael” is finally finished. But it’s only half the movie Fuqua set out to make. Whether the rest ever sees daylight? That’s now entirely up to the audience. What a mess.