Michael (2026) [Film Review]

Joe Jackson runs his household like a drill sergeant who suspects his sons of insubordination at all times. Colman Domingo plays him, and the fear in that house is palpable from the first scene. You understand immediately why a child raised there would grow up to build a fantasy world at Neverland and never want to leave, and you understand why the man who built it might have genuinely believed that world was normal. This is Michael at its best. It does not last long enough.

In Theaters April 24, 2026 · Lionsgate

The Most Anticipated Biopic In Years Lands With a Thud and a Moonwalk

Let’s get something out of the way. The trailer for this film was viewed 116 million times in its first 24 hours. That is more than any trailer for a musical biopic in history, more than Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, more than Bohemian Rhapsody. It beat those numbers before most people on the east coast had finished their morning coffee.

So whatever Michael was going to be, it was always going to be seen, discussed, argued about, and reviewed by people who had already decided what they thought before the lights went down. I am trying to not be one of those people. I watched it. Here is what I found.

Antoine Fuqua directed this thing. The man who gave us Training Day, The Equalizer, and Southpaw. He is not a director who makes small, quiet films about interior lives. He makes films that hit you in the sternum. That sensibility is an interesting choice for a Michael Jackson biopic, and for about forty-five minutes it is actually the right one.

The Gary, Indiana sequences are legitimately unsettling. Domingo’s Joe Jackson performance is doing significantly more work than the film deserves, and the early hour earns real emotional credibility from it.

John Logan Knows How to Structure a Life Into a Film. This Is Not His Best Work.

Then Michael covers Jackson’s life from Gary in the 1960s through the Bad tour in the late 1980s, and covers approximately three decades of one of the most documented, analyzed, disputed, and mythologized lives in the history of popular music in two hours and ten minutes. John Logan wrote Gladiator, The Aviator, and Skyfall.

He knows how to structure a life into a film. And yet Michael has the feeling of a Wikipedia summary read aloud over a highlight reel. Time jump, hit song everyone loves, moment of triumph, time jump, hint of personal struggle, another hit song, time jump. The editing in the concert sequences is aggressive to the point of incoherence. You are aware that the music you are hearing is extraordinary. You are not always able to see why.

Jaafar Jackson Is the Real Thing, Which Makes the Film’s Failures More Frustrating

Jaafar Jackson is Michael Jackson’s nephew, Jermaine’s son, and this is his first film. The resemblance is, depending on your perspective, either a gift or a complication. There are moments where he moves across a stage and you forget you are watching a performance of a performance.

The moonwalk, the hip isolations, the specific way Jackson would hold his left hand out to the side while his right arm dropped, all of it is there with a precision that goes beyond impression into something closer to channeling. When Michael is letting Jaafar Jackson simply exist as Michael Jackson in motion, it justifies the entire enterprise.

The problem is that the film around him mostly treats the music as proof of genius rather than as the expression of a specific interior life that the audience might want to understand. Jackson’s relationship with Joe (Domingo), with the brothers (a good ensemble that the script uses mainly as background), with Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson, doing what he can with limited screen time), and with his own face, his own skin, his own body, is gestured at and then moved past before any of it has time to settle into something meaningful.

The childhood abuse sequences are staged with appropriate gravity. The adult Michael who emerged from that childhood is presented as a wounded idealist whose more complicated qualities the film would prefer you not dwell on too long.

Colman Domingo, for the record, is extraordinary. His Joe Jackson is one of the best supporting performances in any biopic of the last decade, and the film’s most honest hour is the one where Domingo is in the frame. Nia Long as Katherine Jackson has less to do but does it with more warmth than the script provides room for. Miles Teller as John Branca appears to be having a better time than the material warrants, which is its own kind of entertainment.

Juliano Krue Valdi plays young Michael and is the film’s other genuine discovery. The press tour clips of Valdi dancing have been widely circulated, and the performance in the film is everything those clips suggest. He and Jaafar Jackson together in the early sequences create the sensation of watching one person across time, which is technically impressive and emotionally affecting even when the script is not giving them anything interesting to say.

The Elephant in the Room Is Neverland-Sized and the Film Looks Slightly Away

There is an elephant in the room the size of Neverland Ranch, and Michael addresses it the way you address an elephant in a room when the elephant’s estate co-produced your film: carefully, briefly, and with the camera pointed slightly away. The sexual abuse allegations against Jackson are acknowledged in a single extended sequence that is more interested in Michael’s sense of betrayal by the media than in the perspective of anyone who might have been harmed.

This is the creative choice that will define how Michael is remembered in five years. The film that Bohemian Rhapsody wanted to be and that Elvis got closer to achieving is a biopic that takes a complicated person seriously enough to be honest about the complications. Michael is not that film. It is a film that trusts the music to carry the weight of a life it is not willing to fully examine.

Here is the thing about Michael, though. It is going to make approximately $400 million dollars worldwide before it is done, and the people who go to see it are going to have a good time. The music is extraordinary, because it is Michael Jackson’s music and it is extraordinary regardless of context.

Fuqua stages the major performance sequences with a scale and commitment that the IMAX screenings will reward. Jaafar Jackson’s performance is, at minimum, a genuine cinematic event. And for a certain portion of the audience, the ones who want to sit in a dark theater and remember what it felt like to hear “Billie Jean” for the first time, Michael delivers that experience with professional competence and occasional genuine power.

What it does not deliver is the sense that the filmmakers were more interested in Michael Jackson’s interior life than in his record sales. That distinction is the difference between a film you talk about walking out of the theater and a film you remember seeing. Michael is the latter. A pretty good time in the theater. A missed opportunity that will take a more courageous filmmaker and a less cooperative estate to correct.

Michael movie stats

Michael (2026) · Directed by Antoine Fuqua · Written by John Logan · Starring Jaafar Jackson, Juliano Krue Valdi, Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Kendrick Sampson, Kat Graham, Larenz Tate, Laura Harrier, Jessica Sula, Mike Myers · Lionsgate · PG-13 · 2h 10m