Jaafar Jackson Steps Into Michael's Big Shoes

Jaafar Jackson, 29, is the son of Jermaine Jackson and the nephew of Michael. His casting was announced in January 2023 after a worldwide search process. He is not a professional actor — "Michael" is his film debut — and he spent two years in preparation, working with movement coaches, studying archival footage of his uncle's early stage performances, and filling in what he described as significant gaps in his personal knowledge of Michael's teenage years. "I grew up hearing stories about my uncle," he told The Hollywood Reporter at the Berlin premiere on 10 April. "But the years before I was born, the years he spent becoming who he became — those I had to research like a stranger."

“Jaafar Jackson, 29, is the son of Jermaine Jackson and the nephew of Michael.”

Katherine Jackson, Michael's mother and the matriarch of the Jackson family, approved the casting from the project's earliest stages. "He embodies Michael," she said in a statement released when Jaafar's casting was confirmed. The family's co-operation gave Fuqua access to private archival material including home recordings, personal photographs, and recollections from Michael's brothers that other directors pursuing the project had been unable to obtain. Jackie Jackson, Marlon Jackson, and Jermaine Jackson all attended an exclusive early screening in Gary, Indiana — Michael's birthplace — before the Berlin premiere, with Michael's son Prince Jackson also present.

The film opens against a competitive mid-April market. Universal is distributing internationally, Lionsgate domestically. Pre-sale ticket data released by Fandango on 18 April placed "Michael" in the top three advance sales for an April studio release since 2023, suggesting that public curiosity about the film — fuelled in part by controversy — has translated into commercial intent. Analyst David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research projected a domestic opening weekend of $48 million to $62 million, telling Variety on 19 April that the range reflected genuine uncertainty about whether the core Jackson fan base, skewing older, would convert to ticket buyers or remain sceptical. "The biopic is not the record catalogue," Gross said. "The biopic is an interpretation."

The question of interpretation is precisely where the film has attracted its most pointed criticism. Several music and cultural journalists who saw the film in Berlin noted that its treatment of Michael Jackson's childhood — particularly the portrayal of Joe Jackson's controlling and at times abusive management of the Jackson 5 — is unflinching, while its handling of the legal controversies that dominated the later career is notably compressed. Michaels biographer, journalist Randy Taraborrelli, who has written two books on Jackson and was not involved in the film, told the Guardian on 14 April that the decision to step past the allegations "doesn't make it a dishonest film, but it does make it a partial one." Fuqua's response, repeated in multiple interviews since Berlin, is that the film was always conceived as a portrait of the artist rather than a legal chronicle.

Jaafar's performance in the concert sequences — particularly a recreation of the 1983 "Motown 25" television performance in which Michael Jackson first debuted the moonwalk to a national audience — has been the most consistently praised element of the film across early reviews. Empire magazine's 10 April review awarded the film four stars and described Jaafar as "so physically precise that the uncanniness becomes the point." The Guardian, in a three-star review that praised the craft while questioning the omissions, called the Motown 25 sequence "the single best five minutes in any music biopic since Bohemian Rhapsody."

Saudi cinemas will screen the film two days before the US release, beginning 22 April. South Africa opens 24 April, concurrent with the US. The question of how the film performs at the box office in its first weekend will set the terms for how Lionsgate manages what it expects to be a long theatrical run built on the Jackson catalogue's global reach.