The recent release of the movie Michael, depicting the life of music superstar Michael Jackson, has predictably triggered fierce debates about his mixed legacy.
Jackson sold more than 400-million albums more than any other artist. His 1982 Thriller remains the best-selling record, with 70-million vinyl sales. His 1987-1989 Bad concert tour was watched by 4.4-million people around the globe, and grossed $125m (worth $325m today).
Sony Music bought half his music catalogue for a record $750m in 2024. Jackson won 13 Grammy awards, including a record eight in 1984. A posthumous 2021 Broadway tribute, MJ The Musical, has won four Tony awards, grossed $328m, and has been seen by 2.3-million people.
However, by the time of his death aged 50 in June 2009, Jackson was $500m in debt. From 1993 he faced child-abuse allegations which he consistently denied. Though acquitted in the only trial in 2005, his payment of a $23m settlement to the family of his 13-year old accuser, Jordan Chandler, in 1994 had already badly tarnished his reputation.
The $200m Michael, made with the support of Jackson’s estate and most of his family, must thus be seen as part of efforts by his canny estate executors — his long-time lawyer John Branca and music executive John McClain — to restore and preserve the superstar’s brand.
They appear to have succeeded spectacularly, despite the carping of critics who have slammed the movie as sentimental hagiography that fails to deal with its subject’s flaws. Yet Hollywood biopics — as with those about Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Freddie Mercury — rarely dwell on the sins of their heroes, with filmmakers often constrained by the fact that they need the consent of the artists or their estates to use their original music.
Against all predictions, Michael made $217m in the first week of its release, exceeding the previous highest grossing opening for a biopic (Oppenheimer). It portrays Jackson’s life from poverty in Gary, Indiana, to celebrity in Los Angeles, innovatively telling the story from his perspective.
It shows Jackson visiting children in hospital and donating generously to charity. The story centres mainly on his relationship with his scowling, manipulative and avaricious father, Joseph, and with his empathetic mother Katherine.
That Jackson’s legacy has endured and his fortune soared after his death has been due to the greed and genius of America’s corporate capitalism, as embodied by the astute executors of his estate.
As soon as Jackson died in 2009, Branca convened some of the best lawyers and accountants in the music business to devise a strategy to save his estate from bankruptcy and protect his brand. They rushed out the video This Is It in four months, based on the rehearsals Jackson had been conducting for 50 comeback shows in London before his death.
The documentary made an impressive $268m, even as his record sales spiked. Within a year the estate had made $1bn. Its $500m debt has today been transformed into a $3.5bn profit.
His continuing successes from the grave, two decades after his untimely death, have confirmed Jackson’s reputation as the greatest entertainer of all time. The fact that his story and music have generated so much interest among millions of older and newer generations of fans has bolstered the timelessness of his work.
Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Drake are unlikely to attain such heights. With the release of Michael Jackson has achieved in death a remarkable resurrection that would have been impossible had he lived.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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