New $150M Michael Jackson Biopic in Jeopardy Over Key Character
The team behind an upcoming big-budget Michael Jackson biopic is racing to rewrite, reshoot, and re-edit the film’s third act after they discovered it violated a decades-old agreement with one of Jackson’s underage accusers.
Michael’s release date had already been pushed back from April to October, and now Puck reports that the delay is because Jackson’s team agreed years ago they would never dramatize accuser Jordan Chandler or his family’s story.
Chandler was the then-13-year-old boy who told a psychiatrist in 1993 that Jackson had molested him, leading to a criminal investigation and civil suit. The police declined to press charges and Jackson eventually settled with the Chandlers for $20 million, though he maintained he was innocent.
Accusations of pedophilia haunted him for the rest of his life, until he died of a drug overdose at age 50 in 2009, and accusers have continued to come forward even after his death.
Instead of skirting the issue like previous projects about Jackson, the $150 million-budget Michael—which stars Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the titular role, along with Miles Teller, Colman Domingo, and Nia Long—decided to address the allegations head on.
The third act revolved around “debunking” the Chandlers’ claims by showing the ordeal from Jackson’s perspective, making its protagonist the victim of a traumatic extortion plot, according to Puck.
Those creative choices led lawyers from Jackson’s accusers—who are currently suing Jackson’s production companies—to blast the upcoming film as “propaganda.”
Jackson’s estate is involved in the project and vetted the original script, but apparently the executors overlooked the decades-old agreement with the Chandlers. Only in the fall—after the film had been shot and director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) was rushing to edit it to meet an already-aggressive April release date—did the Jackson estate reveal there was a legal issue with the film’s third act.
That revelation was apparently triggered by news articles published in September that revealed the estate had secretly made hush-money payments to five accusers who came forward after HBO released its 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.
The story apparently inspired a new round of due diligence, as everyone involved knew Michael needed to be “airtight,” as Puck put it, and filmmakers didn’t want to new allegations to damage the film’s reputation.
All of this happened after Graham King—the Academy Award-winning producer of Bohemian Rhapsody and The Departed—had teased the film at CinemaCon. Fuqua had raved to ComicCon about how great the film was turning out.
Now King, Fuqua, and screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) have spent weeks working on rewrites, and they’re planning to give the studio a revised script and shooting strategy to approve any day now. (Lionsgate is distributing the film in the U.S. and Universal, which is distributing the film abroad, also needs to sign off, unless it decides to drop the project.)
The Jackson estate had already agreed to pay for any reshoots before the Chandler issue emerged, and now it’s on the hook for the new third act. The estate has generated $3 billion in revenue since Jackson’s death, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
The studios and filmmakers declined to comment on Puck’s article, but they’re apparently confident they can salvage the film and that the footage they do have is impressive enough to be Imax worthy. Jafaar Jackson reportedly delivers as Michael—and that’s probably all his fans really care about anyway.
