Almost five million tickets in France, 782 million dollars raisedof which 423 million remained in the United States at the time of this publication. Michael’s triumph lives up to the expectations that his producers never imagined. With the film’s release scheduled for May 28 in Russia and June 12 in Japan, one billion in grosses becomes a real possibility.
Some will say it was written beforehand. The filming of the film, complex like that of Bohemian Rhapsody ($911 million in revenue, a record to be broken), could have given rise to a mediocre work rejected by fans.
There is talk of 10 million dollars added to an already colossal budget. Repetition of recordings due to script changes. The sequence of the Neverland raid, followed by the case of Jordan Chandler who accused the singer of sexually assaulting him (in conditions similar to those described by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, NDLR), was to serve as a prologue. It was finally eliminated for contractual reasons, and a profound restructuring of the story was required.
However, the numbers don’t lie if we analyze them carefully. The evolution of the entries over the weeks clearly shows that the comments have been positive. Unlike superhero movies that make most of their revenue in the early days, Michael is playing it for the long haul.
And the television reports prove it: applause at the end of each session, improvised dance contests in movie theaters. The biography is experienced as an immersive experience in the world of Michael Jackson for an audience that, for the most part, was not born when the singer died.
«Jacksonmania» and the resurgence of controversies
The end of the film, with the phrase “to be continued”, clearly opens the door to a possible second film. Therefore, we are probably witnessing the birth of a new saga. But this time, it is not based on (science) fiction like Star Wars or a comic book hero like Spider Man. It is the story of a human being who revolutionized the world of pop and was its self-proclaimed king for almost his entire life.
However, this success is just the tip of the iceberg. Parallel to the triumph in the rooms, the “Jacksonmania” has been relaunched. The video is circulating of that two-year-old girl smiling angelically in her car seat while listening to “Billie Jean.” That of that American child who repeats the complete choreography of “Thriller”. And hundreds of thousands of other content on TikTok and social networks where hashtags flourish.
The digital generation has thus appropriated the work of an artist who, however, has been missing for 17 years, reintegrating his pop hits into the present.
The other effect has been to banish the accusations of sexual assaults that have persisted despite the acquittal during the 2005 megatrial. Although the chronology of the film, which begins in 1968 and ends in 1988 – that is, several years before the Chandler case – justifies the absence of that episode, critics have not refrained from remembering it.
Le journaliste Théo Ribeton (Libération, Les Inrockuptibles) va même plus loin, au point qu’on peine parfois à le suivre: « Le film ne parle que de ça, et je n’arrive pas totallyement à éliminer l’hypothèse que ce soit une espèce de pamphlet crypté. The film n’arrive pas à éviter le sujet qu’il n’a pas le droit d’boarder mais en fait il l’boarde tout le temps. »
The French journalist Théo Ribeton (Libération, Les Inrockuptibles) goes even further, to the point that sometimes we find it difficult to follow him: “The film does not talk about anything else, and I cannot completely eliminate the hypothesis that it is a kind of encrypted pamphlet. The film does not manage to avoid the topic that it should not address, but in reality it is present all the time.”
And he adds: “I can only see the film from that angle: it is a biographical film, the most contractual genre, the most judicialized in Hollywood, films that are practically no longer written by screenwriters, but by lawyers and agents. They want to show us that it is wonderful with children. They talk to us all the time about Neverland. You can clearly see that there is something in the implicit consensus that prohibits talking about certain things or talking about them in a certain way because it can have consequences on a career. That is no longer really present. This film is a strong demonstration of that. Here lies the culture of cancellation.”
While we wait for the second part of Michael, the film continues its run. As since 1969, the year of release of the Jackson 5’s first single – and first number one – “I Want You Back”, the legend of Michael Jackson continues to be a hit machine, and a symbolic battlefield where, film after film, the tensions between pop cult, collective memory and controversies are recreated.
