The Michael Jackson biopic Michael opened to critics on Tuesday April 21, 2026, three days before its April 24 theatrical release, and landed with a 27 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 51 reviews.
It is one of the worst-reviewed films of the year. The consensus forming around it is not that Jaafar Jackson failed to embody his uncle, critics are nearly unanimous that he is extraordinary, but that the film built around that performance is afraid of its own subject.
The central problem, stated plainly across review after review: the movie covers Michael Jackson’s childhood through his early solo career and stops.
It ends before 1993. It does not mention the child sexual abuse allegations that defined the final two decades of Jackson’s life and that continue to shape how the world understands him today.
The Wrap called it “probably the first celebratory musical biopic about an artist who spent the last two decades of his life dodging allegations of child sexual abuse” and noted that the film’s answer to that challenge is, “Don’t worry about it. You won’t hear a word about it in Michael… Michael exists in a vacuum that obliterates vital context and important people.”
What Are Critics Saying About The Film?
The BBC gave it one out of five stars. Its review described dialogue with “all the nuance of a road sign” and visuals so lacking in flair that even the recreations of Jackson’s iconic music videos and concerts, the sequences the entire film was built to deliver, come across as a “snooze.”
The Guardian gave it two out of five, calling it “a frustratingly shallow, inert picture, a kind of cruise-ship entertainment, which can’t quite bring itself to show that Michael was an abuse victim, brutalised by his father and robbed of his childhood.”
The word “frustrating” appears in multiple reviews. Rolling Stone threaded it more carefully, acknowledging that hearing the music still works, then noting that the film “twists itself into knots to avoid you thinking about such things.”
Consequence gave it a C-minus and identified the mechanism of the failure:
“This is a movie terrified to explore the interiority of its protagonist, and that approach will work just fine for the fans who just want to watch an uncomplicated ramble of a movie that plays all the hits.”
There are genuinely positive responses. Deadline’s Pete Hammond praised the songs, remastered Jackson originals that Jaafar and young Michael actor Juliano Krue Valdi lip-synch, calling them “gloriously remastered and superbly performed.”
Variety called it “a surprisingly effective middle-of-the-road biopic” that plays better than expected, even accounting for the absence of the abuse narrative.
The Hollywood Reporter said the film “taps into a vein of melancholy underlaying the stratospheric success that’s surprisingly affecting.”
Those reviews represent the minority position, and they acknowledge the void at the center even as they argue the film works around it.
The point of near-universal agreement across both camps: Jaafar Jackson is exceptional.
First reactions from the film’s Los Angeles premiere described him as “electric,” “tremendous” and said watching him makes you “forget he isn’t the real thing.” The criticism is not about his performance. It is about the film that surrounds it.
The Seven Year Production That Failed
Michael has been in development since 2019. The road from announcement to release is one of the more turbulent in recent Hollywood history.
Antoine Fuqua, the director of Training Day, the Equalizer trilogy and other action-driven films, came on board in early 2023.
He cast Jaafar Jackson, Jermaine Jackson’s son and Michael’s nephew, to play the lead role, a decision that provided the film with both a visual anchor (Jaafar bears a strong physical resemblance to his uncle) and a commercial pitch.
The film was originally set for October 2025. It was delayed. The original cut ran nearly four hours. It was edited down.
There were reshoots, nearly a month of them. A report from Puck alleged that a significant third-act storyline involving one of Jackson’s accusers had to be removed for legal reasons following a settlement between Jackson’s estate and an underage accuser.
A source close to the production denied the reports at the time. What is clear from watching the finished film is that the allegations are not in it, regardless of how that came to be.
Producer Graham King produced Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen biopic that made $911 million globally on the back of a similarly fan-friendly, controversy-minimizing approach to its subject.
That film also received mixed reviews and won four Academy Awards. The parallel is instructive, and it explains the strategy, if not the execution.
The film has one significant advantage that no critical score can take away: it has the music.
Over thirty Michael Jackson songs appear in the film, remastered and licensed through the Jackson estate. “Billie Jean.” “Beat It.” “Thriller.” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” “Ben.”
For fans who want to hear those songs in a theater on an IMAX sound system, the film delivers that experience regardless of what surrounds it.
The Context The Film Skips Over
The decision to end the narrative before 1993 means the film covers Jackson’s childhood in Gary, Indiana, his years with the Jackson 5 on Motown, and his breakout as a solo artist through the Thriller era.
This is the version of Michael Jackson that exists in pure nostalgia, the genius, the dancer, the innovator, the boy who was never allowed to be a child.
What comes next in the actual history. In 1993, Jordan Chandler accused Jackson of child sexual abuse. The case was settled out of court for a reported $25 million. No criminal charges were filed.
In 2003, a documentary called Living with Michael Jackson showed Jackson holding hands with a 12-year-old boy and discussing their sleeping arrangements, which led to formal criminal charges of child molestation. In 2005, Jackson was acquitted on all counts by a jury. He died in 2009.
In the years after his death, two more men, choreographer Wade Robson and James Safechuck, filed lawsuits alleging sexual abuse. In 2019, the documentary Leaving Neverland, directed by Dan Reed, presented their accounts in detail. Reed has publicly condemned this biopic.
None of that is in the film. The film ends before any of it begins. It presents, as The Wrap wrote, a narrative in which “nothing of interest happened to Michael Jackson in the last 20 years of his life.”
Paris Jackson’s Response
Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris, who is not Jaafar’s cousin by blood but by family, publicly distanced herself from the project before it was released.
She wrote on Instagram that she had “zero percent involvement” in the film, that she had submitted comments on the script that were ignored, and that Hollywood biopics are “fantasies” sold as truths, full of “sugarcoated” material and “full-blown lies.”
She did not appear at the premiere. She has not promoted the film.
Jaafar’s father Jermaine Jackson and the Jackson estate are both involved with and supportive of the project.
Paris is the outlier in the family’s public response, but her objections broadly track what critics are now saying: the narrative is being controlled, and what’s being controlled out of it matters.
Jackson Biopic Opens Thursday
The film opens April 24 in theaters and IMAX. Whatever critics say, Michael Jackson’s fanbase is enormous and global, his records have sold over 350 million copies worldwide.
Bohemian Rhapsody’s critical reception did not stop it from being one of the highest-grossing films of 2018.
Fans who want to see Jaafar Jackson moonwalk in IMAX will not be deterred by a 27 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
The open question is whether the film finds an audience beyond the base. Critics who have praised it, even conditionally, describe it as a movie for existing fans, satisfying in the way that hearing the songs again is satisfying, hollow in the way that a tribute show is hollow.
Whether that is enough to justify seven years of development and a budget that by some estimates exceeded $100 million will become clear by Sunday morning.
