Per Variety, the Jackson Estate had to shell out $15 million for reshoots because lawyers overlooked a clause in the settlement with Jordan Chandler, one of Jackson’s accusers, that barred mentioning him in any film about Jackson’s life. Last night, Puck reported an even higher price tag for “additional photography,” writing that it cost $50 million, on top of the film’s $150 million budget, to avoid Chandler. Despite a massive diehard fan base that refuses to believe or simply doesn’t care about the decades of credible allegations against him, laundering Michael Jackson’s reputation doesn’t come cheap.
There had previously been speculation about how Lionsgate, director Antoine Fuqua, and the Jackson estate were going to handle the film’s final act. Originally intended to be one massive three-and-a-half-hour epic that tackled the allegations head-on, the film’s producers realized that they couldn’t actually dramatize Jackson’s court battles as scripted by John Logan until after the sequences had been shot. (Though Puck reported last year that Logan’s screenplay portrayed the allegations as extortion attempts.) Chandler laid out his many horrific encounters with Jackson in the Emmy-winning 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland. In a just world, the accusations from Chandler and Wade Robinson, who claim Jackson sexually abused them between the ages of seven and 10, would be enough to prevent a straightforward biopic about Jackson from ever being made. Alas, Michael will now end, much like the made-for-TV miniseries, The Jacksons: An American Dream, at the height of Jackson’s fame. Released in 1992, American Dream had the benefit of hitting screens just ahead of the allegations. It even had the perfect villain, Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, played by Lawrence Hilton Jacobs. Michael will do the same, with Colman Domingo in the role. Unlike American Dream, Variety reports that the movie will excise Janet Jackson completely.
If the movie is a hit, Lionsgate and Universal aren’t ruling out potential sequels. Variety notes that the studios think 30% of the footage cut could be reconstituted for sequels that would also sidestep Jackson’s alleged pedophilia for his “love of animals,” which, yeah, no comment. Still, much of the performances have already been shot, so it wouldn’t be so hard to focus on Jackson’s very normal, non-pedophilia-related life events, such as his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the purchase and curation of Neverland Ranch, and dangling his six-month-old infant over a railing in Berlin. There’s no shortage of very typical human behavior from Jackson’s life that should shield audiences from anything resembling “Wacko Jacko.”
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