First, let’s establish two things. One: Michael, the biopic sanctioned by the Michael Jackson estate that opened Friday, is almost certain to make an enormous amount of money. The movie’s currently on track for a $100 million opening in North America alone, and could make $200 million (or more) intentionally. And that’s just in its first weekend. These aren’t Thriller numbers, but they’re certainly healthy, particularly in the wake of several recent movies about musicians that crashed and burned both critically and commercially.
Two: At least five boys, now men, have credibly and publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were between the ages of 7 and 12.
How can both of these things be true at the same time? Filmmaker Dan Reed has a simple explanation. “People don’t care that he was a child molester,” he told The Hollywood Reporter this week. “Literally, people just don’t care.”
He’s right. Reed’s 2019 documentary, Leaving Neverland, a four-hour accounting of the allegations against Jackson, is excruciatingly detailed and powerfully compelling. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to come away from the film without being convinced that Reed’s subjects, Jackson accusers Wade Robson and James Safechuck, are telling the truth. (Jackson, who died in 2009, denied all claims of sexual misconduct when he was alive. He was criminally charged with abusing a child but acquitted after a trial in 2005.)
Seven years ago, in a fugue of #MeToo-era righteousness, I edited Vanity Fair’s laudatory review of Reed’s film and gave our piece a headline that now seems painfully naive: “Leaving Neverland May Do What No Other Michael Jackson Exposé Could.”
It didn’t. As THR points out, Jackson might be more popular today than he was in the period before Leaving Neverland was released, when the allegations and the strange facts of the musician’s final years—the Martin Bashir interview, the dangled baby—were fresher in the public memory. The Broadway musical MJ—which, like Michael, conveniently covers only the period before the first Jackson accuser came forward in 1993—has grossed nearly $330 million since it began previews in 2021. Two years ago, according to a Jackson superfan on Reddit, the artist surpassed 50 million monthly listeners on Spotify for the first time. His monthly listener count has since climbed by nearly 20 million, and that’s without the bump that Off the Wall and Bad will likely get from Michael’s release.
Leaving Neverland, meanwhile, has vanished from the internet. Two years ago the Jackson estate successfully pushed HBO to remove the project from its streaming platform. In March of last year, Reed released a sequel on YouTube—but the original still can’t legally be viewed in the United States.
