Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
The film is breaking records before most people have seen it. What the box office is telling us about the business of keeping an icon commercially alive.
The Michael Jackson biopic has done something the modern theatrical business has spent six years trying to convince itself was still possible: it has made the movie theater feel essential. The film is tracking toward a global box office projection north of $700 million, making it one of the highest-grossing biographical films ever made. It is not a superhero film, not a franchise sequel. It is a character study about the most commercially successful entertainer in recorded history, and audiences are showing up at a scale the industry insisted they would not.
There is a business story underneath the cultural story. The Jackson estate has spent fifteen years building the case that Michael Jackson the brand is separable from the controversies surrounding him. The biopic is the most visible expression of that strategy. Its commercial performance will determine how aggressively the estate pursues what comes next — the Broadway musical, the expanded catalog exploitation, the licensing campaigns that follow a film like this the way merch follows a tour. The estate owns the music. The music makes the film. The film sells the music. It is a rights business running on a creative bet that the public still has an appetite for this particular icon. This week, the box office confirmed it does.
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