The Michael Jackson "biopic"

0:00The new Michael Jackson biopic doesn't tell the full story. In fact, it ends in the 80s at the peak of Michael's career. People online have taken issue with this fact. The team behind Michael should make a Hitler movie that ends with him triumphantly receiving the Iron Cross First Class Medallion for his distinguished service on the Western Front in World War I. R. Kelly biopic that ends with the release of Space Jam, music from and inspired by the motion picture. Jeffrey Epstein, the story of New York's greatest financier. But for all the shade, Michael is a massive hit. It's currently the biggest movie in the world with the biggest opening ever for a biopic.

0:39People are getting up and dancing in theaters. What the dancers might not know is that this movie had to get made, then unmade, and then made again because of the elephant in the editing room. We're going to tell that story on today's Explain from Vox.

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1:38Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. You've been hit by, you've been hit by. Today Explained. Matt Bellany is a founding partner of Puck, and he's maybe got more tea on the Michael movie than any other reporter on Earth. Well, this project begins in 2019 with the Leaving Neverland documentary that came out on HBO and featured the two main accusers of Michael Jackson in a very influential and pretty stark and harrowing documentary recounting the allegations against him. He told me if they ever found out what we were doing, he and I would go to jail for the rest of our lives.

2:27Secrets will eat you up. You feel so alone. I want to be able to speak the truth as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long. That was devastating for the Michael Jackson estate, which had been pretty successful over the previous decade in rehabilitating Michael's image to the point where they were able to do a Broadway show. It is now one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. And the musical just earned, get this, 10 Tony nominations. And a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. All right, Michael Jackson won by Cirque du Soleil, performs 10 shows a week at the Mandalay Resort and Casino. And the music was still popular around the world.

3:15This documentary comes out and radio stations started pulling the songs. And outrage over the conduct, alleged conduct, was pretty widespread. So they decided that it was time for a movie. And Graham King, the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody, was very interested in doing a Michael Jackson movie. And he signed on to produce this, and they started on their way. So you're saying the germ of this movie is explicitly a counter-narrative to the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, which sort of tarnishes Michael Jackson's image around the world. From the estate's perspective, 100%. That's what they wanted out of this project.

3:57But what's interesting about the original plan for the movie is that it explicitly took on the allegations against him and in many ways, according to the original script, shot those allegations down. So I imagine you're one of the few people who saw a version of this movie that isn't the most popular movie in the world right now. What exactly was in this script and how does it differ from the movie that people are seeing right now? So the original script by John Logan opens with Michael Jackson at Neverland and there are police sirens outside and they are there for him. and then it goes back into his whole rise to fame and how he got here.

4:49And the third act of the movie, the last 45 minutes or so, are Michael's life at Neverland and how he became increasingly detached from reality and surrounded by children. But then the accusers come for him. And the family of Jordan Chandler, the 13-year-old boy who ultimately made allegations against Jackson, they are portrayed as out to exploit money for him. And Michael is 100 % presented as the victim of these allegations. There's a strip search scene where the cops come to Neverland and conduct a strip search on him and he's crying. It's really tough to read in the script. And at the end of the movie, or at the end of the script, there's a conversation that Michael has with his mother about how it all ended up here.

5:50And it's really, it's kind of a sad moment about how he became this misunderstood figure in the culture. That's not in the Ultimate Movie. None of that is in the movie. It stops at 1988, The Bad Tour. And the reason for that is the legal stuff. Not only does it stop at The Bad Tour, but it starts at The Bad Tour. Instead of starting in his Neverland estate and being a flashback into how did he get into all this trouble, it starts with him about to take the stage at this triumphant moment in his career in the late 80s and it's funny hearing you describe the movie that you read about in this script it seems to make a lot more sense having seen the final product because they keep trying to set up that Michael Jackson is gonna have this big split with his family and that it's gonna be a lot harder for him when he's on his own.

6:52And they keep trying to set up his relationship with kids because he's constantly caring for sick kids and giving kids gifts and hanging out with kids at toy stores, but it never really goes anywhere. What we end up with in the final product is a weird sort of slight counter narrative that seems to set up Michael as some sort of secular saint who just loved children and wanted to care for sick people and walk around his neighborhood with animals. It just seems kind of bizarre. It makes a lot more sense when you know that in the original script, that was ultimately weaponized against him in the eyes of the script.

7:28And others would argue that there was other nefarious reasons for why he was so close to children. But that was 100 % part of the message of the original script. Right. You're describing a movie that had something to say, whether or not people agree with it or not. It has something to say, which is that Michael Jackson was misunderstood and was innocent. Instead, we're left with a movie that has nothing to say. Tell me about the legal trouble that helped us end up with this movie. So after all of that was shot, all of the original script was shot, the estate discovered that in the 90s, there was a settlement with the family of Jordan Chandler that precluded either the estate or the family from dramatizing the events of the relationship between them.

8:19And the somewhat ironic part is that obviously that agreement was to prevent the family from selling their story for a movie or something like that. But then 30 years later, it comes back to haunt the Jackson estate when they are trying to make a movie of their version of those occurrences. So once the lawyers discovered this, they alerted the producer, they alerted the studio, and all hell broke loose. They basically said, we can't release this movie. So they decided to take the script, cut it up, and do it as two movies. The first movie would be devoid of anything having to do with the allegations.

9:06It would just be about his rise to fame. It would be an arc where the main tension is with Michael and his father, which was in the original script. That was there. But it wasn't the main storyline. Michael escaping his father was not the main storyline. And then if the movie is successful, which it now is, they plan to do a second movie that will engage more clearly with those allegations. I'm glad you brought up a second movie because I think the most interesting thing or the most surprising thing that happened in this entire movie was at the very end when three words appear on screen, his story continues.

9:46So is this going to be the first musical biopic that gets a sequel? Has there been another one? I don't believe there has. But obviously, once you know what the original plan was, it makes a lot more sense that they would cut it off and try to make two movies. and the demand seems to be there. That is what I want the world to feel.

10:15Magic. And the world showed up for the Michael magic. Raking in$97 million domestically and$217 million worldwide. That is demand for a sequel. So it makes sense they would do it. Now, it's going to be a huge challenge because they've got two issues. And I just talked about this with the head of Lionsgate, the studio, on the town. Some of the things that were in the script that you read and reported on obviously cannot be included. But continuing to get a deeper understanding of who Michael was, I think there are any number of ways the filmmakers will be able to pull that off. Basically, the challenges are they can't dramatize Jordi Chandler.

10:56So that's out. Those allegations are out. And also, there's a second issue here. the fans and the general public have now shown that they are interested in a Michael Jackson movie that doesn't bring up the bad stuff that is really just a celebration of the music and his personal narrative now if they go there and make the darker and more controversial movie that engages with the allegations, do the fans actually want that? Is that going to be successful? I don't know the answer to that.

11:38The movie's obviously a huge success now, but, you know, leading up to its release and even since it's been released, there's a ton of people obviously criticizing the movie for having nothing to say, for sidestepping the allegations. How have the filmmakers responded to those critiques? Is it just, oh, we're going to work on a sequel. Don't worry about it. Well, Antoine Fuqua, the director, did an interview with The New Yorker in which he was very respectful of the allegations, but also said, sort of questioned some of the double standards that go on out there. You know, people, there were some ugly parts of Elvis Presley's background that were not in that film, and nobody questioned that.

12:21and it was interesting to see him come out and say that. The marketing for this movie has really focused on the music and the performance and kind of sidestepped the uglier stuff and I think that that's all by design. They decided that they did not want to engage which makes it even more interesting on the second movie because you sort of have to engage or else you're really going to get criticized.

12:54As you heard earlier, you can hear more about Michael on The Town with Matthew Bellany, how we should be thinking about what didn't make it into the movie in a minute on Today Explained.

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17:18Today Explained. My name is Steve Knopper. I am author of MJ, the Genius of Michael Jackson, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times and Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal and other publications. For people who maybe weren't around in the 80s and 90s, like I think both of us were, how big did Michael get? It's really difficult to sort of imagine in today's fragmented media and entertainment world just how gigantic Michael was. He was overwhelming. I mean, Quincy Jones, who is the producer of Thriller and Off the Wall, when they made the Thriller album, his goal was to get people to buy many, many copies per household of the album.

18:01And that's what happened. And it wound up selling, I think the latest number I saw over time is 70 million albums sold. And that's just like an impossibility in 2026, right? Yeah, absolutely. Because, well, first of all, there's not really, albums do not sell to that magnitude anymore because everybody's streaming everything. And in today's world, because of the internet and because of streaming and downloading and all the other stuff that's happened, there's communities of people for every artist. So BTS is huge. But they're only huge in a fragment of the market. Taylor Swift is even huger. But even so, she's not even close to what Michael Jackson was in the 80s.

18:47And even before we get to the 90s and the allegations, this man wasn't eccentric. People could tell Michael was different, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for a lot of reasons, he said all the time throughout his life, and many others have made this point, that he had an incredibly unique childhood. Ladies and gentlemen, would you greet the Jackson Five?

19:14You know, by the time he was seven or eight years old, he was a major star. He was on Motown. You know, they were gigantic. They were BTS in their day. And he was very, very young to have experienced that. And he talked all the time. He repeated this detail about how he'd be in a recording studio. And I'd record for hours and hours. He'd be staring longingly at these kids playing across the street at a playground. They'd be rooting and making noise and I would cry. And he was stuck in this recording studio doing all this work at a very young age. It'd make me sad that I would have to go and work instead.

19:55And so as he grew up, he kind of like had to figure out why he was different. And he started to yearn for a childhood. And this made him, even as a young man in his late teens and early 20s, kind of yearn for friendships with children. I mean, people wonder why I always have children around, because I find the thing that I never had through them. That was his version of how this played out. And then it all takes quite an ugly turn. I feel like I can still remember when it happened. And Michael Jackson was going to be on all the news channels one night. And then it was so weird to watch this guy who you thought was literally the coolest human being on earth having to talk about being like strip searched by the police.

20:45It was the most humiliating ordeal of my life. One that no person should ever have to suffer. Right, right. I mean, that unfolded in a very complicated way in the early 90s, where there was a boy who was 13 who accused him of sexual abuse, basically. The entertainer's life has become a tornado of rumors and accusations since a teenage boy said Jackson sexually molested him. Michael Jackson denied it vehemently, said it never happened. And then the Santa Barbara County Sheriff in California kind of picked up on these charges and moved forward with some kind of prosecution case. An arrest warrant for Mr.

21:28Jackson has been issued on multiple counts of child molestation. But before anything could happen with the courts, the boy and his family settled with Michael Jackson. And so that never went to court. There was never any record of what did or did not happen. And the whole thing kind of registered as in the media, certainly as a settlement. Of course, it wasn't the last set of accusations. No, that's right. There have been other people, other boys generally who came forward and made allegations. But the whole thing kind of advanced in the early 2000s. And that story began when Michael kind of infamously went on a British television network and spoke to a journalist named Martin Bashir in this documentary about how he commonly slept in a bed with children who were not his own or not part of his family.

22:27I have slept in a bed with many children. I sleep in the bed with all of them. When Macaulay Culkin were little, Kieran Culkin would sleep on this side, Macaulay Culkin's on this side, his sister's in there. We're all just jamming the bed. And we wake up like dawn and go in the hot air balloon. He talked about it as if this was no big deal. It happens all the time. It's healthy. And people were outraged. Another related thing that happened in that video was that there was a young boy and his family interviewed as part of that documentary, basically agreeing and supporting what Michael Jackson had said.

23:02The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone. You really think that? Yeah. Of course. You're taking a position that you use every single night that you go into. You sleep, and you're shining with another. But when the documentary came out and got all this negative attention from Michael Jackson, the boy and his family switched their stories. And then they started accusing Michael Jackson of child sexual abuse, just as the previous boy had done in the early 90s. The prosecution picked up the case, and Michael Jackson went on trial in 2005 for child sexual abuse. We love to be a Michael Jackson fan.

23:44We love to be a Michael Jackson fan. A chorus of collective voices cheering for Michael Jackson. Innocent, let it go. And railing against the press. I think the press is trying to make this a freak show. And eventually, after a long period and quite an extended media circus at the courthouse, Michael Jackson was found not guilty by a jury. We the jury in the above entitled case find the defendant not guilty of a lewd act upon a minor child as charged in count five of the indictment. Dated June 10th, 2005, for person number 80.

24:22After he passed in 2009, it seemed like there was, and my book came out during this period, but it seemed like there was sort of a rush to lionize Michael Jackson again. And people seemed comfortable sort of saying, well, he was found not guilty by a court in 2005. So we can kind of restart experiencing his music with joy and no guilt again, as perhaps we weren't able to before. And that period lasted for a few years. And there, you know, there are a lot of tributes made to him and that sort of thing after this tragedy of his passing at just 50 years old. And then in 2019, this documentary on HBO came out called Leaving Neverland.

25:03Hello, Wade. today is your birthday so congratulations i love you goodbye and what that is about is two now grown men wade robson and james safchuk who had been friends with michael in an earlier period when they were boys robson actually testified at michael jackson's trial in 2005 defending him and saying no child sexual abuse had ever happened. But this documentary that came out in 2019 was four hours long, and both men detailed these very traumatized memories of what the King of Pop had allegedly done to them. I think it's worth asking here that Michael Jackson, you know, was never found guilty of abusing children in a court of law.

26:01Has there ever been any smoking gun definitive proof that he did this stuff? No, no. All of these charges against him are in the category of accusation. And some people listening to this might say, what a naive person is saying that. But it's factually true. You know, he was found not guilty in a court in 2005. The Leaving Neverland allegations are as vivid and believable as they may seem. They're just that. They're allegations. And, you know, and then there's these more recent charges that are just coming up in court with this family who knew Michael, and those have yet to be adjudicated. So, and then the original charges that we talked about in 1993, those were settled.