Michael is startin’ somethin’ at the box office. The controversial Michael Jackson biopic, which tells the story of the King of Pop’s life from his time in the Jackson 5 through the Bad tour in the late 1980s and elides his child sexual abuse allegations, debuted in theaters on April 24. The Antoine Fuqua film stars Jaafar Jackson as his real-life uncle, opposite Colman Domingo as Michael’s father Joseph Jackson, Nia Long as his mother Katherine Scruse-Jackson, Miles Teller as his manager John Branca, Kendrick Sampson as his co-producer Quincy Jones, and Mike Myers as CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff.
Side A · 33⅓ RPM
How Well Do You Know Michael Jackson’s Music?
“Who’s Bad?”
End of Side B · Stylus Up
Your King of Pop Rank
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Moonwalker — or still warming up the turntable?
⤴ PLAY AGAIN
Lionsgate has announced that, as of Saturday morning, Michael is projected to conclude its opening weekend with a 3-day total between $90 and $100 million at the domestic box office. In addition to more than surpassing Straight Outta Compton’s $60.2 million to mark the best opening weekend in history for a music biopic, this total sees the new biopic launching at No. 1 at the domestic box office. That makes it the first movie to unseat the smash hit The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which is the highest-grossing movie of 2026 worldwide and has topped the domestic box office for three consecutive weekends. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the first 2026 movie to have been No. 1 for three weekends in a row. It seems unlikely that Michael will either follow in its footsteps or break that record, considering the fact that the upcoming blockbuster sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2 is set to debut in theaters during its sophomore weekend.
It is ultimately unknown what the theatrical break-even point for 2026’s Michael is. While the movie’s production budget is reportedly more than $165 million, making it more expensive than multiple Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, the fact that it is a Lionsgate production makes its potential for success more opaque. Lionsgate is known for offsetting the majority of their production budgets with international presales, lowering the benchmark past which their movies can be considered profitable. However, it seems like Michael could very well be on a path toward becoming a major box office hit. In fact, if it follows the unusually steep trajectory of the 2018 biopic smash Bohemian Rhapsody (which debuted with $51.1 million and eventually climbed to $910.8 million worldwide, becoming the first and so far only music biopic to pass the $300 million milestone), it could potentially become the first billion-dollar biopic. While critics’ Michael reviews, which have earned it a dismal 38% score on Rotten Tomatoes (compared to Bohemian Rhapsody’s 60%), do not bear this possibility out, the movie has performed extraordinarily well with audiences so far. It has earned a Verified Hot score of 97% on the RT Popcornmeter (Bohemian Rhapsody earned 85%) and a CinemaScore of A- (Bohemian Rhapsody got an A), which could indicate that it will receive a huge word-of-mouth surge in the coming weeks.
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