Michael Is About to Do Something No Biopic Has Ever Done, and It Could Happen This Weekend
Summer box office charts are usually dominated by franchise sequels and comic book spectacle, not three hour biographical dramas about musicians who died over a decade ago. Yet ‘Michael‘ has spent months quietly proving that a well-told life story can still move mountains at the global box office.
The film chronicling Michael Jackson’s rise from the Jackson 5 to global superstardom has already rewritten the record books for its genre, dethroning both ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as the highest grossing music biopic ever and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ as the highest grossing biopic of any kind. Those milestones alone would have made for a remarkable run, but the film shows no signs of stopping there.
New box office tracking puts ‘Michael’ at a $991.4 million worldwide cume after its eleventh weekend in theaters, positioning it to become the very first biopic in history to cross the billion-dollar threshold. With just roughly $8.6 million standing between the film and that milestone, some analysts believe the crossing could happen as soon as this weekend depending on how strongly key markets hold.
That $991.4 million total breaks down into a $371.3 million domestic haul and $620.1 million earned internationally across 85 markets, a split that highlights just how much of the film’s success has come from outside the United States. Markets like Japan and Russia have played an outsized role in keeping that international number climbing, helping offset any softening tied to the ongoing World Cup and the film’s earlier digital release in select territories.
What makes the milestone even more striking is the film’s production budget, reported at roughly $200 million before marketing costs. A biopic reaching a billion dollars worldwide on that kind of budget represents an entirely different profit picture than a typical blockbuster crossing the same threshold, and it underscores just how efficiently ‘Michael’ has performed relative to its costs.
Some box office trackers following the film’s weekly performance are now projecting a final run somewhere between $1 billion and $1.05 billion, depending on how the film’s remaining international holds play out over the coming weeks. Japan and Russia in particular are expected to remain the deciding factors in whether the film lands closer to the low end or high end of that range.
Biopics rarely operate at this kind of scale, and ‘Michael’ crossing a billion dollars would mark uncharted territory for a genre more commonly associated with awards season prestige than blockbuster grosses. The film has already claimed the record for highest-grossing musical biopic ever, surpassing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ and the record for highest-grossing biopic of any kind, surpassing ‘Oppenheimer.’
Have you watched Michael yet?
Reaching a billion dollars would put ‘Michael’ in a tier of its own, a distinction no biographical film has ever achieved, regardless of subject matter or budget. With momentum still building in key overseas markets, the countdown to that milestone appears to be measured in days rather than weeks at this point.
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