The self-proclaimed King of Pop proved his generational staying power again at the box office over the weekend when the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, earned a record-breaking $97 million domestically during a global launch that exceeded $217 million. The Antoine Fuqua-directed chronicle of Jackson’s life takes viewers from the singer’s humble Indiana beginnings to the peak of his stardom, briefly jumping ahead to 1988 during the singer’s Bad tour and then dipping out with a “His Story Continues” end card before the credits.
That timeline glosses over the allegations of sexual abuse leveled against Jackson by accuser Jordan Chandler, whose case is not covered in the film, for reasons director Fuqua shared with Deadline in an interview in which he confirmed that the $200 million film underwent a costly $50 million in reshoots due to a clause in Chandler’s settlement with the Jackson estate guaranteeing that his case against the singer would never be dramatized.
Fuqua never met Jackson — who died on June 25, 2009 at age 50 of acute propofol intoxication — but was once considered to direct the “Remember the Time” video and said after reading the script for the biopic and seeing a screen test with MJ’s nephew and the film’s star, Jaafar Jackson, he was sold on the project.
“I wanted to humanize Michael. I wanted people to get to know him: How eccentric he was, how he was as a young man. I always felt that younger generations didn’t know Michael or his story,” Fuqua said of his goal for the film. “In order to tell anything about Michael, you had to remind people about the magic of him, the power of the music, and the fun that he brought into the world and his own insecurities. He’s one of the most complex characters to tell a story about. My approach was to ground him as much as we can, so that he’s relatable to anyone outside of being on that stage.”
As for how he felt after realizing the dramatizing of Chandler’s story would result in costly reshoots, Fuqua said it happened when he was handing in the director’s cut. “That was a tough day,” he said, noting that the film appears to set up a potential sequel taking on the allegations leveled against Jackson by Chandler and other accusers; Jackson steadfastly denied any allegations of sexual impropriety and was never convicted or held legally liable in any of the lawsuits against him in his lifetime or in the years since.
Fuqua had previously told The New Yorker that the film originally opened with the infamous 1993 police raid on Jackson’s Neverland Ranch home following molestation allegations of abuse by 13-year-old Chandler. Jackson settled a civil lawsuit from Chandler’s family for a reported $25 million, after which Chandler stopped cooperating with prosecutors. Jackson was acquitted of other child molestation charges in 2005 and his estate has denied those and other abuse allegations leveled against the singer.
Asked if it weighed on their minds that the allegations were not addressed in the first part, Fuqua said, “It definitely did for a while, because we had to rethink everything. That was a tough period. [producer] Graham King, [screenwriter] John Logan and I banged our heads around. We had a lot of meetings. But we clicked into it at the same time: The movie is called Michael so you have to focus on Michael. Unless you can truly take your time, let’s go back to the beginning and really show people who he was on the stage. He’s a superhero on the stage. Just like a human being, movies have the power of empathy to just say this is a human being. No one is perfect. It was important to take the audience through a process of how do you get to wherever it’s going to go in a second movie; for people to get a bigger idea of his personality and what shaped him.”
The reason the film cuts off where it does, Fuqua said, is because the singer’s arc as “so extreme” he felt it important to begin at the beginning and explore the emotional and physical abuse Jackson endured at the hands of his domineering father, Joe Jackson, while planting seeds about the singer’s difficult third act.
“He starts talking to [manager] John Branca about the pills, ‘These pills are making me sleepy and the doctor is saying you gotta take these pills’; that’s what killed him,” he said of the medical-grade anesthetic the singer was taking to fall asleep after years of alleged prescription drug use resulted in chronic insomnia. “So, it was set up along the way that these are the things that led to wherever it’s going to go which we all know. That’s part of the tension you feel, because you know it didn’t end well, unfortunately.”
And, after rampant speculation about a possible sequel, Fuqua unequivocally confirmed that there is “absolutely” one-third or so of shot footage that could go to a potential part two. “We went pretty far,” he said of how deep into Jackson’s later years the production delved. “We went through the Jordan allegations we couldn’t use. We went farther than that. Maybe a year or two after that (1995) when things turned against Michael.”
If there is a sequel, Fuqua said he’d like to direct it if the schedule works out. “It would kill me if somebody else did it,” he said.
