The Online Civil War About ‘Michael’ Is a Battle Over Truth

Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches?

If so, Michael—a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was—intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue.

The film’s release has sparked a familiar but newly intensified civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.

Musically, Jackson was in a class all his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists charted on Billboard and he became a recurring meme online, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 number one singles, countless awards, twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy was also defined by multiple allegations of sexual abuse, an occasionally eccentric personal life, and Jackson’s on-record admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. “This guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,” Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 Emmy-winning HBO documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct, recently told the Hollywood Reporter.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who maintains Jackson’s innocence, never intended to fully avoid the allegations that circled Jackson later in life. According to him, the original cut of Michael included a reenactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, where Jackson was strip-searched to verify the physical description of his first accuser, Jordan Chandler. But the scene was ultimately scrapped along with the film’s entire third act—totaling $15 million in reshoots—because of a legal clause in a settlement with Chandler that forbade the depiction of his experience on screen.

The result is a film that stops abruptly in 1988 and erases the most controversial two decades of Jackson’s life, choosing instead to emphasize Jackson’s musical legacy over the more contentious aspects of his personal behavior.

The decision to scrub those elements is not surprising when you consider that the Jackson estate had approval over the use of his music, essentially granting it veto power over the film’s final cut. One argument that keeps coming up on social media is that critics should judge Michael on its own terms rather than on what they think it should have been. “It seems like people wanted a movie [that] was never going to exist,” noted one X user.

Jackson’s fans argue the allegations shouldn’t eclipse his musical and artistic legacy, separating the artist from the work, while critics contend that a biopic should present a complete picture of Jackson, regardless of how unflattering that picture may be. As film critic Sean Burns characterized it on X, ending “with the release of Bad is like ending an OJ biopic with him winning the Heisman.” A good Michael Jackson movie, wrote the artist Harmony Holiday, “would be part tragedy, part farce,” calling attention to how the film lacks the real kind of interiority that made Jackson so polarizing.

“Watching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority,” critic Alison Willmore noted in Vulture.

As so many of us seek out and sculpt our own truths, there is also perhaps a responsibility to challenge the film’s framing, or at least question the assumptions it asks its audience to accept.

In response to the backlash, the Jackson family has expressed that they intend to reclaim Jackson’s public image. “Sorry media, u don’t get to control the narrative anymore,” Taj Jackson, Michael’s nephew, posted on X. If anything, Michael is a reminder that the collective narrative is dead. Several Jackson family members—including Janet, Rebbie, and Randy—declined to participate in the film. Jackson’s own daughter, Paris, said on Instagram that it “panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy.” (There is talk that a potential sequel is in the works that touches on Jackson’s darker side.)

Michael won’t make or break Jackson’s legacy. He’s virtually cancel-culture-proof, too large and immovable in the pop imagination. “Michael’s too important a character for our culture to just walk away from,” Fuqua said in an interview with The New Yorker. So Jackson will continue on as he has for so long—streamed, sampled, impersonated, memed, and mythologized—each of us creating our own narratives, and living with our own truths, about him.