The new “Michael” movie revolving around the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has finally made its way to theaters. But if you were looking for this movie to be an all-encompassing retelling of the highs and lows of the “Bad” singer, we have some unfortunate news for you.
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As we’ve been telling you, and as you may have already gathered from the trailer, this new film centers on a certain part of Michael’s life. To be specific, you’ll see his early days as the young, leading member of The Jackson 5 in Gary, Indiana, to his debut solo album “Off the Wall,” to his history-making album, “Thriller,” and all the way up to the very beginning of his “Bad” era. Yes, you read that right; it’s stopping right around the time “Bad” hit the radio waves, specifically with him performing the titular song at Wembley Stadium in London in 1988.
So, given that timeline, it stands to reason that the more controversial parts of the “Leave Me Alone” singer’s life—you know, those child sexual abuse allegations that first went public in 1993, the settlement that came the following year, the subsequent criminal trial he endured in 2005 and his eventual acquittal—wouldn’t be included.
Taking this information into consideration, along with the fact that the movie has been marketing itself for at least the last six months as being “just the beginning” and not the entirety, it makes sense why neither the allegations nor the trial would be included.
And if that’s still not a good enough reason for you, you should know that the original script for the film actually did address the allegations and the trial and included scenes related to it in the third act of the movie. However, due to legal constraints, the film crew had to go through millions of dollars of reshoots to work around it. What were those legal constraints, you might ask? Well, a large part of it had to do with the fact that lawyers for the Jackson estate were very late to discover that there was a clause in place in the aforementioned settlement that “barred the depiction or mention of him in any movie,” according to Variety.
This, in turn, forced the writers to go and rework the ending, which resulted in what we’re seeing now. So, before you are persuaded to think that this movie is somehow trying to sanitize or gloss over the problematic parts of the “Remember the Time” singer’s past, just know that isn’t the case. Sure, this movie warrants some critiques, and there’s room for improvement in several different spots. But giving this film a thumbs down for what it leaves out when there was red tape discovered late in the process that forced filmmakers to go back to the drawing board and essentially make this a two-part film (which was recently confirmed by “Michael’s” lead star Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew) would be disingenuous.
Michael is in select theaters now and hits theaters everywhere on April 24.
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