‘Michael’ Becomes First Music Biography Ever to Cross $1 Billion Worldwide

Biopics rarely become box office juggernauts, and music biopics have an even tougher time turning prestige subject matter into blockbuster numbers. Yet the genre has spent 2026 quietly rewriting its own rules, with one film in particular refusing to slow down months after its theatrical debut.

That film is ‘Michael‘, the Antoine Fuqua directed chronicle of Michael Jackson’s rise from the Jackson 5 to global superstardom, starring his real life nephew Jaafar Jackson in the title role. The movie has already climbed past one milestone after another since its April release, with roughly 371 million dollars coming from domestic theaters and the rest earned internationally in markets like France, Brazil and Mexico.

According to box office tracker Luiz Fernando, whose update on X detailed the film’s twelfth weekend performance, ‘Michael’ has now officially crossed the 1 billion dollar mark at the global box office.

The account’s figures put the international cume at an estimated 629.3 million dollars across 85 markets, with Japan and Russia offsetting slowdowns tied to the World Cup and the film’s digital release in other territories, pushing the worldwide haul past the 1 billion dollar line with a domestic total of 371.8 million dollars against a reported 200 million dollar production budget.

That would make ‘Michael’ only the second film of the year to reach ten figures globally, following Universal’s animated hit. Currently at $991.7 million, its strong performance in Japan is expected to push it past the $1 billion mark soon, reports had noted just days earlier, underscoring how quickly the Japanese market accelerated the film’s final push toward the milestone.

The achievement caps a run that has already reshaped the record books for the genre. Michael dethroned Bohemian Rhapsody to become the highest grossing music biopic of all time, with Universal generating a significant share of the international total after acquiring foreign theatrical and ancillary rights. It later surpassed Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as well, becoming the highest grossing biopic of any kind in film history.

The film’s commercial dominance stands in sharp contrast to its reception among critics, who took issue with its decision to leave out the child sexual abuse allegations that shadowed Jackson’s later career. Michael holds a critics score in the high thirties on Rotten Tomatoes, yet boasts a remarkable 97 percent audience score on the same site, reflecting just how disconnected professional reviews have been from ticket buying audiences. That gap has not stopped the film from becoming Lionsgate’s biggest theatrical release ever.

Production was not without its own drama. The road to release involved 50 million dollars in reshoots after the Jackson estate identified an issue in the screenplay concerning one of Jackson’s accusers, who was never meant to be dramatized in the film. The finished film closes with the on screen text The Story Continues, a detail that has only fueled speculation about a sequel covering the later years of Jackson’s life and career.

With the billion dollar threshold now cleared, attention turns to just how far ‘Michael’ can stretch its theatrical legs before studios start planning that next chapter. Do you think a sequel covering Jackson’s more turbulent later years could match this kind of box office magic, or has ‘Michael’ already peaked with its origin story approach?