The Michael Jackson biopic “Michael” shattered box office records in its opening weekend, earning $218. 8 million domestically. That figure marks the biggest domestic opening for any biopic ever made, surpassing “Oppenheimer,” and positions the film to become the most successful musical biopic of all time. The film took in $40 million on its domestic opening day alone, the largest opening day for a biopic and the biggest box office opening day of 2026.
While critics described the film as sanitized, audiences gave it near-perfect exit scores. The gap between the critical reception and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is among the largest ever recorded on the platform. The release reignited a heated public debate over the accusations that shadowed Jackson’s career. Dan Reed, director of the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland,” went in front of a camera days after the numbers dropped and compared Jackson unfavorably to Jeffrey Epstein.
Reed told Variety the biopic was “impossible to take seriously as a counter-narrative to Leaving Neverland. ”
Antoine Fuqua, the biopic’s director, addressed the controversy head-on, stating on the record, “Sometimes people do some nasty things for some money. ”
The accusations span more than three decades. In 1993, 13-year-old Jordan Chandler accused Jackson of sexual abuse.
Jackson denied the allegations. The case was settled out of court for more than $20 million with no admission of guilt, and no criminal charges were ever filed. After the settlement, Chandler declined to testify, leaving prosecutors without their central witness. Supporters pointed to the lack of evidence, while critics viewed the payout as suspicious.
A second set of accusations emerged in 2003 following a television documentary. Jackson was arrested and charged with 14 counts. The 2005 criminal trial ended in acquittal on every single count after a jury deliberated for 32 hours over seven days. On the first vote, nine of the 12 jurors voted to acquit immediately.
The 2003 documentary that triggered the charges was made by British journalist Martin Bashir. Titled “Living with Michael Jackson,” it set off a firestorm. What is less known is that Jackson had his own camera rolling the entire time Bashir was filming him. In February 2003, Jackson released a rebuttal documentary called “The Footage You Were Never Meant to See,” which showed Bashir complimenting Jackson on camera, calling him a wonderful father and praising him as graceful.
Fourteen million people watched the counter-documentary. Bashir never directly addressed it. After Jackson died in 2009, Bashir went on camera and said Jackson’s lifestyle was “unorthodox, but not criminal. ” He stated, “I never saw any wrongdoing myself.
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Days after being arrested in December 2003, Jackson sat down with CBS journalist Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes. ” He denied the allegations forcefully, saying, “If I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists. ” When asked why people kept coming after him, Jackson said it was about money. He also addressed the criticism over sharing a bed with children, stating that if someone has bad intentions, sharing a bed with a child is wrong, but insisted, “That is not who I am.
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In 1995, two years after the first accusations, 60 million people watched Jackson and his then-wife Lisa Marie Presley sit down with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Primetime Live. ” Sawyer asked Presley whether she believed the allegations. Presley said she never directly asked Jackson if they were true because he discussed the matter at length with her on the phone. The 1993 case contains details that rarely receive attention.
Before any accusation went public, Jordan Chandler’s father, Evan Chandler, demanded $20 million from Jackson privately, structured as four screenplays at $5 million each. Jackson refused. His private detective held a press conference calling it extortion. Another detail involves Evan Chandler injecting his own son with sodium amatol, a sedative with hypnotic effects, during a dental procedure.
That is how the confession was extracted from Jordan, according to reports. When the FBI asked Jordan Chandler to testify at the 2005 criminal trial, he refused, saying he would not testify against Jackson under any circumstances. Jackson settled the civil lawsuit in 1994 for around $20 million, not as an admission of guilt. He said he did it because the case was interfering with his career and later said he regretted it.
The 1994 settlement contained a clause that legally banned Jordan Chandler from being depicted in any film. The original biopic script was built entirely around the 1993 case as its third act. When lawyers found the clause in fall 2024, the entire third act had to be cut. The filmmakers completed 22 emergency days of reshoots, adding an extra $10 to $15 million to a budget already at $155 million, and the film was pushed back a full year.
The FBI opened an investigation into Jackson in 1992. After the 1993 allegations, federal agents actively investigated for nearly a decade, tapping phones, bugging hotel rooms, and conducting full federal surveillance. During the 2003 raids on Neverland Ranch, 16 hard drives were seized and sent to the FBI’s computer analysis response team for full forensic analysis. Nothing incriminating was found.
The FBI released over 333 pages of documents in December 2009, with over 600 pages in total. Two-thirds of those files placed Jackson as a victim of extortion attempts, not as a perpetrator. In December 2004, the FBI officially closed the investigation, citing no outstanding leads or evidence items. In December 2025, the Department of Justice released over 300,000 pages of Epstein files, including a photo of Jackson standing next to Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Palm Beach home.
Dan Reed used the image to fuel the comparison between Jackson and Epstein. Jackson’s bodyguard Matt Fiddes, who was present when the photo was taken, came forward on December 20, 2025. He said Jackson had been recording music with his friend Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees and wanted to move to Palm Beach to be near him. His team arranged viewings at multi-million dollar properties in the area, and one house on the viewing list happened to be Epstein’s.
A viral audio clip also spread claiming Macaulay Culkin said Jackson saved children from Epstein’s Island. Culkin never said that. Two AI detection tools analyzed the audio, with one rating it as very likely AI generated and another giving it a 96. 9 percent probability of being fake.
Macaulay Culkin, the “Home Alone” star who grew up in the public eye, has maintained the same position since 1993. In 2003, before the trial started, Culkin went on live national television to defend his friend without being asked. On Larry King’s show, Culkin said he played video games with Jackson and visited his amusement park. When King raised the topic of the bedroom, Culkin explained that Jackson’s bedroom was two stories with three bathrooms.
On the 1993 settlement, Culkin said, “If someone had done something like that to my kid, I wouldn’t just settle for some money. I’d make sure the guy was in jail. It just goes to show they got the money and they ran. ”
During the 2005 trial, his managers and agents told him to stay out of it.
Culkin showed up anyway, took the stand, and testified under oath that he had shared a bed with Jackson over a dozen times between the ages of 9 and 14 and was never once touched inappropriately. He called the allegations “absolutely ridiculous. ” Jackson’s defense attorney Thomas Mesereau said afterward that Culkin and Chris Tucker “will always go down in my book as loyal good friends. ”
“Leaving Neverland,” released in 2019, was built entirely around the testimonies of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claimed Jackson had abused them as children.
The documentary won a Primetime Emmy and changed how millions viewed Jackson. Reed built the four-hour documentary without interviewing a single person who contradicted the claims, and he admitted on record that he chose not to use footage that would have challenged his subjects. The credibility problem is significant. Robson was 10 years old when Jackson was first investigated in 1993.
He told police nothing happened. In 2005, at the criminal trial, Robson was Jackson’s first defense witness. He testified under oath that he had slept in Jackson’s bedroom more than 20 times and was never once touched inappropriately. Safechuck told investigators the same thing in 1993.
After Jackson died in 2009, Robson filed a lawsuit in May 2013 claiming abuse. Safechuck filed his own in 2014. Either Robson and Safechuck lied under oath in 2005, or they are lying now. Both things cannot be true at the same time.
Reed also admitted that Safechuck’s timeline had a problem. Safechuck claimed abuse happened in an upstairs room at Neverland’s train station, but construction permits showed the station was approved in September 1993 and did not open until 1994, two years after Safechuck said the abuse ended. Reed conceded his subject’s timeline was wrong. In 2024, “Leaving Neverland” was pulled from HBO after a settlement and is currently commercially unavailable.
Robson and Safechuck are now suing Jackson’s companies for $400 million. The trial is set for November 2026, and Reed is already working on “Leaving Neverland 3” to document the trial. New federal filings in February 2026 alleged years of abuse and described what they called multi-million-dollar payoffs that dried up in 2025. The Financial Times also reported that in 2020, the Jackson estate quietly settled with a separate group of accusers for $16.
5 million. Lionsgate has called the biopic effectively part one, leaving the doors open for a sequel that could address the allegations directly.
