The Michael Jackson biopic is not done yet. Michael pulled in $97 million domestically in its opening weekend and $218.8 million worldwide — and is still going, adding $11 million on Tuesday alone. Lionsgate is moving toward a sequel, and the conversations are already underway.
Lionsgate film chair Adam Fogelson confirmed the development on The Town podcast with Matt Belloni. Producer Graham King wants to shoot this year. Director Antoine Fuqua wants back in, telling Deadline it “would kill me if somebody else did it” — but his upcoming Netflix project with Denzel Washington could make the timing complicated. Belloni floated the idea of King stepping in as director if Fuqua’s schedule doesn’t work, and Fogelson didn’t exactly shut it down, saying more clarity should come in the next couple of weeks.
Here’s where it gets tricky. The first film ended in 1988 — right before everything got complicated. A sequel means the ’90s, and the ’90s means Neverland, the allegations, the Super Bowl, Dangerous, HIStory, and a version of Michael Jackson the public had never quite seen before. Writer John Logan is reportedly still figuring out how to crack the screenplay, and it’s not hard to see why.
The Jackson estate’s agreement with Lionsgate bars the Chandler allegations from being dramatized — a constraint that cost the production a reported $50 million in reshoots on the first film. Jackson denied all allegations, was never criminally charged, and reached a civil settlement with the Chandler family in 1994. So the sequel will have to navigate one of the most scrutinized decades in pop culture history with one hand tied behind its back.
Fogelson isn’t pretending that’s a simple task. “Continuing to get a deeper understanding of who Michael was, I think there are any number of ways the filmmakers will be able to pull that off,” he said — though he acknowledged the creative team still needs to sit down and map out the full vision before he can say more.
What he did make clear is that there’s no shortage of material. The 1993 Super Bowl halftime show — the one that literally changed how the NFL thinks about halftime — hasn’t been touched yet. Neither have the Bad album’s biggest moments or the bulk of HIStory. Fuqua confirmed that footage already exists that goes well beyond where the first film ended. “We went pretty far,” he said. “We went through the Jordan allegations we couldn’t use. We went farther than that — maybe a year or two after that, when things turned against Michael.”
The first film closed with a credits card that read “His Story Continues.” Lionsgate is taking that literally — the question now is just how much of the story they’re actually allowed to tell.