‘Michael’ is about to take the musical-biopic crown from Graham King’s own ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

The music biopic survives on a single, almost theatrical promise: that a life can be re-staged convincingly enough to send audiences back to the room where the myth was made. Lionsgate’s ‘Michael’ has now made that promise pay on a scale the genre has rarely seen, turning the early arc of Michael Jackson — Jackson 5 to the Bad tour — into the studio’s largest theatrical success in its history and one of the most lucrative musical biopics ever filmed.

As Deadline first reported, the Antoine Fuqua–directed film has crossed $900 million worldwide and sits within roughly $11 million of overtaking ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the Freddie Mercury picture that, until now, was producer Graham King’s highest-grossing release at $911 million. Should it cross that line — a matter of days at its current pace — King will have dethroned his own record, and ‘Michael’ will become the highest-grossing musical biopic ever made.

Written by John Logan, a dramatist as fluent on the stage as on the page, the film leans on the oldest device in the biopic playbook: it casts the performance itself as the story. Jaafar Jackson, in his screen debut, does not so much impersonate his uncle as reanimate his stagecraft, while Colman Domingo and Nia Long, as Joe and Katherine Jackson, anchor the family drama beneath the spectacle. The result plays closer to a staged concert than a cradle-to-grave summary — a structural choice that gives the picture its theatrical reason to exist.

For Lionsgate, the number rewrites the studio’s self-image. A company built on franchises and mid-budget genre fare now holds its biggest global hit in a prestige biopic, vindicating a bet that star-driven music films can still command the kind of worldwide theatrical footprint streaming was supposed to have eroded. King, who once steered ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to a surprise Best Picture campaign, has effectively built a second factory for the same product — the icon’s life as a guaranteed event.

The film opened at the end of April to a $97.2 million domestic debut, the strongest ever for a musical biopic, and has since drawn well past $544 million from overseas, led by the United Kingdom ($68M), France ($54.3M) and Germany ($34.4M) against a production cost north of $200 million. Now in its seventh week, it reaches home viewing this month even as it keeps adding screens abroad.

The irony is exact: the man who turned Freddie Mercury’s farewell into a $900-million-plus phenomenon is about to be toppled at the top of his own genre — by himself.

Tags: box-office, Michael Jackson, Graham King, Jaafar Jackson, Lionsgate, Michael