A new film about Michael Jackson’s extraordinary but troubled life is set to open in cinemas. It’s tracking to be very popular – but will it tell the full story?
Bohemian Rhapsody was a troubled production, to put it mildly. The original star, Sacha Baron Cohen, departed and the original director Bryan Singer was fired. But the biopic of Freddie Mercury and Queen went on to make more than $900m (£660m) at the box office and win four Oscars.
Given that success, it seemed logical when the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody, Graham King, revealed in 2019 that he would be making another biopic of a music megastar: Michael Jackson. In short, King was following Queen with the King of Pop.
His new venture, Michael, had one obvious difficulty: Jackson had been accused of child abuse. In 1994, he reached an out-of-court settlement with one of his accusers, Jordan Chandler, and he was acquitted of molesting a 13-year-old boy in a criminal trial in 2005.
Lawyers for the estate of Jackson and its executors, who are among the producers of the biopic, tell the BBC that they “firmly and unequivocally believe in Michael Jackson’s innocence, which was unanimously adjudicated by a jury and supported by extensive evidence”.
