Antoine Fuqua reportedly got an extra $15 million for those allegation-removing Michael reshoots

To be very specific—per reporting in Bloomberg, and sources quoted by THR—both Fuqua and King apparently had to postpone future projects when the reshoots were ordered, at which point new payments to them, taken as advances against the film’s royalties, were added to the movie’s already considerable $150 million budget. (Directors and producers often get paid with advances like this, which basically mean they don’t earn royalties on a movie until the amount they’d get is above whatever the initial payment was; still, it’s an extra influx of immediate cash, which also usually doesn’t have to be paid back if the film underperforms.) (Not that Michael is likely to, as filmgoers are apparently falling over themselves to ignore reality in favor of Fuqua’s greatest hits compilation of the pop superstar’s life.) 

The upshot of it all is that while stripping the pedophilia allegations out of Michael may have been, as previously reported, a “complete nightmare” creatively, it was actually a pretty neat trick, financially.