Michael opened on April 24, 2026 with $97.2 million domestically — the biggest opening weekend a musical biopic has ever had, beating the record 2015’s Straight Outta Compton set by $37 million. Its first day alone, $39.5 million, out-earned Oppenheimer’s opening day. By July 12, it had crossed $1.021 billion worldwide, the first biopic in film history to do it, and Lionsgate’s biggest release ever. None of that box office history required good reviews. Michael has a 38% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 39 on Metacritic — "generally unfavorable" by the site’s own label.
A genuine critics-versus-audience split
The gap here isn’t subtle. Critics were unimpressed: the Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls it a "greatest hits album that could’ve benefitted from including liner notes to give actual insight," despite crediting star Jaafar Jackson’s "smooth moves." The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it "frustratingly shallow," and the BBC’s Nicholas Barber wrote it off as "a bland and barely competent daytime TV movie." Not every critic piled on — Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it a "surprisingly effective middle-of-the-road biopic" — but the aggregate score reflects a real consensus problem, not a few outliers. Audiences disagreed almost entirely: an A− CinemaScore and 90% positive on PostTrak, the kind of gap between critical and audience response that studios usually only get with genre franchise films, not awards-adjacent biopics.
Why the film critics saw isn’t the film that was originally planned
Some of that "shallow" criticism has a specific, documented cause. During post-production, Jackson estate lawyers discovered a 1993 settlement — reported at $20 million, with accuser Jordan Chandler — that included a clause barring his depiction or mention in any film about Jackson. The version of Michael that had already been shot opened with Jackson staring at police lights during the real 1993 Neverland Ranch search, and built its entire third act around the fallout from the allegations. That structure had to go. Filmmakers spent 22 days in reshoots in June 2025, at a reported cost of $10-15 million, funded by the Jackson estate in exchange for an equity stake in the finished film, replacing the cut section with a new ending built around Jackson preparing to go onstage during his Bad tour.
None of that is a judgment on the underlying 1993 allegations, which remain a separate and disputed matter outside the scope of what changed in this film’s editing room. It is a documented, verifiable fact that a legal settlement clause — discovered late, after a version of the film already existed — forced a structural rewrite of the movie’s back half. Critics complaining that Michael skates past the more difficult parts of its subject’s life aren’t speculating; there’s a specific, sourced reason a widely-reported chunk of the film isn’t there anymore.
What "made history" actually means here
The box office numbers are the least ambiguous part of this story: $1 billion-plus, a genre record opening, the biggest film Lionsgate has ever released. Whether that adds up to the film actually being good is a different, contested question — and the size of the gap between what audiences paid to see and what critics wrote about it is, on its own, one of the more interesting data points in this year’s box office.