Michael Jackson — how Hollywood’s biggest biopic went off the wall
The Thriller star’s estate has made billions since his death despite unresolved allegations about child abuse. So why has the movie about his life been thrown into disarray?
In 2012 I met John Branca, Michael Jackson’s lawyer and the brains behind Jackson’s estate, which is worth an estimated US$2.4 billion (AU$3.8m). Branca, worth about US$100 million (himself, began working for Jackson in 1980 and helped him seal his famous purchase of the rights to the Beatles’ songs. When we met Branca had just worked with the director Spike Lee on a documentary about Jackson’s Bad album. Proclaiming Jackson as a better dancer than Fred Astaire, he mixed suavity and steel in the way that only high-powered Americans can.
Now 74, he is a prime mover behind a film about Jackson’s life that he has said would become “the largest-grossing, most acclaimed biopic in the history of Hollywood”. There’s a snag, though. The release of the movie has reportedly been derailed because it depicted Jordan Chandler, who in 1993, aged 13, was the first to accuse Jackson of sexual abuse. When Chandler and his family confirmed a reported $20 million settlement and nondisclosure agreement with Jackson in 1994, the singer’s lawyers are said to have agreed not to discuss the details of the deal or depict the Chandlers in any future film. The biopic, thought to have featured a showdown between the Chandlers and Jackson’s legal team, is apparently due to begin reshoots in March.
Such a basic error is at odds with the gimlet-eyed efficiency with which Jackson’s legacy has been milked. Last year his estate made an estimated $600 million via music, royalties, shows and merchandise, putting Jackson at the top of Forbes magazine’s macabre “highest paid dead celebrities” chart (Freddie Mercury is at No 2, Dr Seuss third).
The profits have rolled in. In 2009 Michael Jackson’sThis Is It turned rehearsal footage from his uncompleted tour into a documentary that made $261 million; and MJ the Musical, which opened on Broadway in 2022, has won four Tonys and grossed more than $230 million, making it one of the most lucrative stage musicals in history. Last year Sony bought half of Jackson’s back catalogue for about £500 million. Now comes the movie, tentatively titled Michael and directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), with Jackson played by Jaafar Jackson, the singer’s nephew, son of his brother Jermaine.
So the estate is doing very nicely, thank you. The prime beneficiaries are Jackson’s sons Prince, 27, and Bigi, 22, and daughter Paris, 26, who last year revealed she was a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. They have yet to receive their inheritance due to a tax dispute.
In the meantime, the executers of this money-printing behemoth are Branca and the accountant John McCain. Branca’s centrality is emphasised by the fact that he is being played in the biopic by a bona fide Hollywood star, Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick).
Branca was fired by Jackson in 2003 after a private investigation into an alleged flow of funds from Jackson via Branca and the Sony Music chief executive officer Tommy Mottola into offshore accounts. There was little evidence for the allegations, which some think were part of a smear campaign to persuade Jackson to fire Branca. The singer rehired him on June 17, 2009, just eight days before he died.
Chandler, meanwhile, has vanished from public life. Reports suggested he had moved to New York, studied finance, invested some of the settlement and changed his name. His father, Evan, had plastic surgery to disguise himself from Jackson fans and killed himself in 2009, five months after Jackson’s death.
So was the singer bad, dangerous or just off the wall? A convincing case for his guilt came in Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary in which Wade Robson and James Safechuck alleged with disturbing detail that Jackson had sexually abused them as children. They are involved in legal proceedings against his estate. In 2022 Branca told The Daily Telegraph that the documentary was “probably false as it is an infomercial for a failed lawsuit”.
Jackson has largely escaped cancellation, and many fans are violently convinced of his innocence; the biopic is thought to portray him as the Chandlers’ victim. Opinions vary wildly. In 2019 I asked Barbra Streisand, who was friendly with Jackson in the Eighties, about Leaving Neverland. Streisand said she believed Robson and Safechuck, but that Jackson’s “sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has … I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him.” Streisand later issued a public apology, saying: “I didn’t mean to dismiss the trauma these boys experienced.”
Jackson is probably too big to fail. We may also have been dazzled by those shiny posthumous products. Or does he belong to a pre-cancellation generation? Jessa Crispin, the editor of the blog The Culture We Deserve, has claimed that “anyone who built up a loyal following before the advent of social media is ultimately immune from it”. That’s not the case for Gary Glitter, but it may be for Jackson and David Bowie, who is accepted to have slept with underage girls.
Either way, it makes for nuanced drama. John Logan, who wrote the script for the Jackson biopic, told The Times last year: “The quote I have hanging over my computer is ‘Nothing that is human is alien to me’. You have to have empathy for the most monstrous characters.”
Colman Domingo, who plays Jackson’s father, Joe, in the biopic, has said that it charts “three decades of Michael’s life and we get to the early Noughts”, and that the Jackson family are “on board with us making the most complex film possible”. It just got a lot more complex.
The Times
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