Is ‘Michael’ Set to Smash Past $1 Billion at the Box Office?
Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic has spent the last two months quietly rewriting the box office record books, and its theatrical run shows no signs of slowing down even as the summer movie season heats up around it.
What began as a troubled production, delayed by costly reshoots after the Jackson estate flagged a legal issue in the script, has turned into one of the defining box office stories of the year.
‘Michael’ already dethroned ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and shortly after that milestone, it passed Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ to claim the title of highest-grossing biopic ever made across any genre. Both records were once considered practically untouchable for a film centered on a single musician’s life story, yet Jaafar Jackson’s performance as his real-life uncle has carried the film past both benchmarks with room to spare.
According to updated box office tracking, ‘Michael’ now sits at 977,864,221 dollars worldwide, putting it roughly 22 million dollars away from crossing the billion-dollar mark. Japan alone has reportedly contributed 24,407,087 dollars to that total so far, with the territory projected to add somewhere between 55 million and 60 million dollars to the film’s global haul as its theatrical run there continues.
That Japanese release window matters significantly, since industry trackers have pointed to the territory as the most likely factor that finally pushes ‘Michael’ past a billion dollars worldwide. With Lionsgate’s Kino distribution partnership keeping the film in Japanese theaters well into the fall, some estimates suggest the milestone could be reached by mid-July, giving the film a clean, direct path to the record rather than needing a rerelease to get there.
Domestically, ‘Michael’ has already become Lionsgate’s highest-grossing release of all time, surpassing ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ in the process, while pulling in 370.2 million dollars in North America against 607.2 million dollars internationally as of its most recent milestone update. The film continued posting daily grosses above a million dollars for 52 consecutive days in the United States, an unusually long tail for a film built around a single historical figure’s story.
What makes the film’s trajectory even more notable is how sharply its box office performance has diverged from its critical reception. ‘Michael’ holds a critics score in the high thirties on Rotten Tomatoes, largely tied to the film’s decision to omit the child sexual abuse allegations that shadowed Jackson’s later life, while carrying a 97 percent audience score on the same site. That gap reflects just how differently professional critics and paying audiences have responded to the film’s choice to focus on Jackson’s rise rather than the more controversial chapters of his story.
Should ‘Michael’ cross the billion-dollar threshold, it would become just the second film to do so at the 2026 global box office, following Universal’s ‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie.’ It would also mark the first biopic in cinema history to ever reach that milestone, a distinction that neither ‘Oppenheimer’ nor ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ managed despite their own record setting runs.
The film’s success has already extended well beyond ticket sales, with Jackson’s back catalog streams surging significantly since the film’s April release and Sony Music’s stake in his catalog, valued at up to 1.5 billion dollars, benefiting directly from the renewed attention. Lionsgate is also reportedly eyeing at least one more film covering additional chapters of Jackson’s life, with sources pointing to his later years, including the Dangerous era and his history making 1993 Super Bowl halftime performance, as likely territory for a follow up.
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