Up until this week, Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer had the most lucrative opening weekend of any biopic in history. There's plenty to debate about the way Oppenheimer told the story of its subject, and the film's decision to omit any depiction of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains controversial. But Oppenheimer represents an honest attempt to reckon with the legacy of a subject who caused a great deal of suffering in the world. It earned great reviews, won the Oscar for Best Picture, and became a cultural phenomenon, especially coming out on the same weekend as Barbie. This past weekend, the Oppenheimer record was shattered by the Michael Jackson movie Michael, a biopic that pointedly refuses to reckon with anything negative that Jackson might've ever done in his life.
If you ever wondered why Lionsgate kept going with the nightmarish production process of Michael, this weekend's box office receipts are the reason. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Michael racked up $97 million in its first weekend at the US box office. (Oppenheimer, by contrast, had an $80 million opening.) Michael also did extremely well overseas; adding $120.4 million to reach a global total of $217.4 million. It has the second-highest opening weekend of any movie of 2026 thus far, behind The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and ahead of Project Hail Mary.
Pre-release buzz for Michael was wildly negative. Jackson's estate participated in the movie's creation, which meant that it plays as pure reputation-laundering propaganda. Director Antoine Fuqua reportedly had to scrap the planned third act, about Jackson reaching an out-of-court settlement with the family of the first child who accused him of sexual abuse, when lawyers discovered that the settlement prohibited any depiction of the child's story. Reviews of Michael were largely negative, but audience word-of-mouth was strong. Michael did especially well among Black and Latino audiences, but it put up numbers across all demographics and got an A- CinemaScore grade. (I reviewed Michael, and I found the performance scenes to be electrifying even though the entire enterprise remains downright evil.)
There's already a lot of handwringing over the success of a biopic that refuses to address anything fucked-up in its subject's life. Online, I saw a lot of jokes like this.
In the wake of the Michael Jackson biopic success, producers are now planning a John Wayne Gacy movie that focuses only on his career as a clown.
— Frank Conniff (@frankconniff.bsky.social) 2026-04-24T18:29:24.205Z
There's already talk of a Michael sequel that might use some of the scrapped footage originally intended for the first movie. That movie would have to get into the darker parts of Jackson's life and career, and it has the potential to be among the most uncomfortable, least crowd-pleasing blockbuster sequels in history. I am already dreading the prospect of reviewing that one.
Michael did much, much better commercially than this weekend's other pop-star movie. David Lowery's arthouse flick Mother Mary, which features Anne Hathaway as a fictional singer in a complex psychological entanglement with her former costume designer, expanded nationally and only earned $1.1 million. The Hollywood Reporter says that it "all-out bombed."
