There will never be a star as big or as complicated as Michael Jackson. Making an honest movie about him is impossible.

It’s hard to overstate just how monumental a pop star Michael Jackson was and the unparalleled impact he made on music. He broke barriers for Black artists, built one of the most devoted fan bases in history and created songs that continue to be a mainstay on airwaves and playlists more than a decade after his death. His once-in-a-lifetime voice and unmistakable dance moves defied preconceptions about what the human body can do, arguably overshadowing the considerable controversies in his private life.

Jackson faced multiple allegations of child sexual abuse over his lifetime, including a 1993 case he settled out of court and a high-profile 2005 criminal trial that ended in acquittal. In the years since his death, additional civil lawsuits have emerged — some dismissed, others revived and ongoing — from people who claim that Jackson abused them as children. In 2026, members of the Cascio family, who once referred to themselves as Jackson’s “second family,” also filed suit against his estate, alleging Jackson preyed upon them over the course of more than a decade.

Despite Michael’s endlessly fraught legacy, there was clearly a public craving for a celebration of his artistry and incomparable impact on pop music. The Michael biopic, released April 24, made $218 million at the global box office in its opening weekend, a record-breaking number for the genre.

Michael has a glowing 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes but a low 37% rating from critics. Why the polarized reception? The main argument against the film is that, despite its captivating reflection of Michael’s musical prowess, the allegations of child sexual abuse against him are omitted from the story entirely, rendering it incomplete.

The Jackson estate lent the rights to Michael’s hit songs and funded much of the film helmed by renowned director Antoine Fuqua, whose credits include Training Day and the Equalizer movies. The intent of the filmmakers was perhaps noble: to tell the complicated story of the biggest pop star of all time. But balancing that with the reputation-altering accusation against him feels like an impossible task for a feature-length film. Which leaves us with an uncomfortable question about the highest-grossing movie in the country: Should it have been attempted at all?

What do people want from a Michael Jackson movie? 

The two-hour musical biopic follows Michael from his early years as the standout vocalist of the Jackson 5, a pop band composed of brothers that yielded its fair share of hits like “ABC” and “I’ll Be There,” to adulthood as he fights to escape the tutelage of his demanding and sometimes violent father, Joe Jackson, played by Colman Domingo.

Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew who plays the idol as an adult, bears an uncanny resemblance to Michael, both in his physical features and his dancing prowess. The audience is meant to believe that Michael’s abusive upbringing under Joe Jackson and childhood fame may also have stunted his emotional development and left him “different,” as the fictionalized version of his mother says in the film.  He’s portrayed as childlike and soft, with an affinity for exotic animals (including a giraffe and a CGI monkey), toys and Disney.

The film often feels like a playlist of music videos stitched together with loose threads of plot, emphasizing Michael’s unmatched star power and singularity above all. One scene shows Michael painstakingly rearranging note cards on a wall listing the tracks on his 1982 album. As we’re shown “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and “PYT,” it hits us — this guy is responsible for some of the greatest songs ever recorded. His weirdness, the movie seems to say, is secondary to his talent. Michael settles on “Thriller” as the title track. It becomes the top-selling album of all time. His success is not just massive — it’s mythological.

Now that algorithms and streaming services have fractured so much of music fandom, it’s true that we may never see another artist so widely beloved again. It’s easy to see why fans wanted this so badly: He is a generation-uniting, genre-defying hitmaker whose songs mean a lot to them. “I have met a number of people who disagree about God; I have never met anyone who disagrees about ‘Thriller,’” Slate’s Nadira Goffe writes.

In his review for Yahoo, critic Brett Arnold writes that “though the allegations never come up in the movie, they loom over it in trying to explain any possible behavior the audience may be aware of, as if to cut off the conversation before it starts.”

The movie concludes in 1988, at the height of Michael’s success, before the first allegations of sexual abuse went public. Michael enthusiasts who have maintained his innocence through all these years have been sparring with critics online for days, arguing that this particular movie didn’t need to address any of that.

Michael’s undeniable talent at his career zenith broke racial barriers — a cultural victory that, to some, makes allegations against Michael feel racially charged, as if the only explanation for them could be a desire to sabotage a Black artist who was changing the industry.

“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua, the director, told the New Yorker. He said that he doesn’t know the truth behind the allegations made about Michael but added that “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.”

Still, part of the weirdness of the movie’s execution is not intentional. It lies in the fact that the original version was very different from what was released in theaters. According to Variety, sequences that explored the impact of child molestation allegations on Michael’s life — much of the film’s third act — were cut. Attorneys for the Jackson estate realized after filming that there was a clause in the settlement with accuser Jordan Chandler that barred the depiction or mention of Chandler in movie adaptations. The ending had to be overhauled, which resulted in 22 more days of shooting, millions of dollars added to the budget, a yearlong delay to the original release and a total removal of all allegations from the film.

Since the estate was responsible for the mistake, it took on much of the cost of reshoots, which also increased its equity stake and thus its control over the movie. Instead of literally ending with flashing police lights and a morose Michael reflecting on his life in the mirror, the film ends in 1988 with Michael performing “Bad,” which is, as WBUR’s Sean Burns writes in his review, “kind of like ending an O.J. Simpson biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy.”

Is it even possible to make a complete Michael Jackson movie? 

As celebrated as he was, Michael nevertheless became pilloried in the final years of his life — his name became shorthand for dark jokes about pedophilia, his private life provided constant fodder for tabloid chatter, and his surgically altered appearance was mocked throughout popular culture. His reputation has rebounded considerably in the past decade.

But the job of a biopic is not only to tell the story of someone’s accomplishments — it’s to contextualize the highs and lows, to understand the person and their art. By definition, you’re not supposed to separate the art from the artist in that forum. Michael ultimately falters because it functions more as a Jackson rehabilitation project — Fuqua admitted as much when he told Deadline that his goal was to “humanize” Michael. But therein lies the paradox of the whole project: Can you celebrate the hits and also take a hard-nosed look at the disturbing allegations against Jackson in the same work?

In the film’s final moments, Michael almost addresses its own incompleteness. The words “his story continues” appear on the screen, just as they might in a Marvel movie.

Though Michael was never convicted of the allegations against him, their weight cannot be understated. They are recurring, disturbing, involve children and span decades, with new ones emerging this week. In 2019, it felt like the documentary Leaving Neverland, in which Wade Robson and James Safechuck say that Michael sexually abused them, would forever change how people thought about the King of Pop. But it was pulled from HBO after a legal battle and is now difficult, if not impossible, to watch.

That’s why it felt unsettling to sit in a packed theater on the day of the film’s release as people sang along and swayed to the Michael songs we all know by heart. People wouldn’t show up in record-breaking numbers to see a movie that turns their favorite bops into a bummer. So Michael attempts to sidestep the negativity entirely. It was a doomed task from the start.