‘Michael’ Hits $20M Globally and Keeps Defying the Odds in Its Fifth Weekend

In its fifth weekend of release, the Michael Jackson biopic ‘Michael’ is still holding at the top of the Russian box office and refusing to give up its grip.

Box office tracker Luiz Fernando reports that the film grossed $540k on its fifth Saturday across 977 theaters, a drop of just 24.6% from the previous Saturday, pushing the Russian cumulative total to $20 million from 2.8 million admissions, with a projected $1.5 million to $2 million four-day weekend on the way.

Russia’s $20 million milestone confirms the territory as the first this year to hit that mark for the film, with the cumulative data showing that overseas markets now account for nearly 62% of its global total, which currently sits at approximately $960 million as the biopic continues its march toward one billion dollars.

The Russian performance is particularly noteworthy given the competitive pressure of a fifth weekend in theaters. Most studio tentpoles have significantly dropped off by this point, but ‘Michael’ has been proving throughout its run that it does not follow the standard theatrical lifecycle.

Producer John Branca cited the global reaction as unprecedented, saying that after opening weekend the response around the world, on social media and at the box office, confirmed this was something the industry had not seen before.

The film has now dethroned ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, with $358.6 million earned domestically and $553.3 million internationally, the latter figure generated almost entirely through a major offshore rights deal with Universal Pictures, which acquired foreign theatrical and ancillary distribution in most global territories.

Beyond Russia, the film dropped only around 10% in Japan from its debut weekend and remains atop Brazil’s yearly film chart, with sustained strength across multiple international markets simultaneously powering its approach to the billion-dollar threshold. The pattern across all three territories points to a film with the kind of word-of-mouth-driven longevity that typically arrives once or twice per decade.

Lionsgate was forced to conduct $50 million in reshoots after the Jackson estate identified a key issue with a plot point in the original screenplay concerning one of Jackson’s accusers, ballooning the total production cost and raising the stakes of the film needing exceptional global performance to justify the investment. The box office has long since answered that question.

The film stars Michael Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the title role, directed by Antoine Fuqua from a screenplay by John Logan, with Colman Domingo as Joseph Jackson and Miles Teller as Jackson’s attorney John Branca. As the biopic holds strong in Russia heading into its fifth weekend and approaches a landmark that no music film has ever crossed, the story of its global journey is looking increasingly like one of the most remarkable theatrical runs in recent cinema history.

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