Michael Jackson’s ‘Michael’ Moonwalks Past ‘Oppenheimer’ Toward Billion-Dollar Box Office Glory

Summer 2026 has belonged to Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic ‘Michael’ in a way few studios could have predicted months ago. The film opened in April with the biggest debut ever for a musical biographical movie, and it has barely slowed down since, even as it heads into its ninth weekend in theaters. For Lionsgate, the King of Pop’s life story has turned into the kind of box office run that studios chase for decades and rarely catch.

That momentum has only grown stranger and more impressive given the obstacles working against it. The film hit Digital HD on June 9, the kind of release that usually drains away theatrical interest, and it has had to compete with World Cup viewing pulling audiences elsewhere in several key markets. Despite all of that, ‘Michael’ keeps inching toward a milestone that very few films, let alone biopics, ever reach.

The numbers from the film’s ninth weekend show just how resilient the run has been. International box office added a solid 11.6 million, a 39.3 percent drop that reflects both the World Cup and the digital release pulling some viewers away, though strength in Japan and Russia helped soften the blow.

That brings the international cume to 591.7 million across more than 85 markets, pushing the worldwide total to roughly 959.6 million when combined with a domestic haul of 367.9 million.

Those figures put ‘Michael’ on pace to pass Oppenheimer’s final worldwide total of 975.8 million before the close of June, which would make it the second biggest biopic of all time behind only Christopher Nolan’s film. From there, the path to a billion dollars looks less like a question of if and more a question of when, with projections now pointing to a final run somewhere between 1 billion and 1.05 billion.

‘Michael’ had already rewritten music biopic history before this latest milestone came into view. The film passed Bohemian Rhapsody’s worldwide total earlier this month, with Billboard reporting the Freddie Mercury biopic finished its run at 216.6 million domestically and 694.3 million internationally for a 910.9 million global gross. ‘Michael’ has now comfortably surpassed that mark while also becoming Lionsgate’s highest grossing release ever, ahead of franchise titles like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The film has done it despite a rocky path to release. Lionsgate absorbed an additional 50 million in reshoots after the Jackson estate flagged a clause preventing the film from dramatizing one of Jackson’s accusers, pushing the net production cost to roughly 200 million. Critics were split on the result, but audiences clearly were not, turning ‘Michael’ into one of the rare biopics whose box office trajectory has only accelerated the longer it stays in theaters.

The box office success has also fueled momentum behind a planned sequel covering the more turbulent chapters of Jackson’s later life. Fuqua told Deadline that roughly a third of the footage he shot never made it into the final cut and could form the backbone of that follow up. Asked whether he would want to direct it himself, Fuqua said he would like to, joking that it would kill him if somebody else did it.

With Japan still ramping up and the digital release unlikely to fully offset the film’s theatrical pull, ‘Michael’ looks set to close out its run as not just the biggest music biopic ever made, but one of the defining box office stories of the year. What started as a music biopic with an uncertain road to release has turned into a billion-dollar phenomenon that few saw coming.

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