Japan’s ‘Michael’ IMAX Frenzy Has the King of Pop Marching Toward an Unprecedented Billion-Dollar Milestone
Since its debut in late April, the Antoine Fuqua-directed ‘Michael’ has been rewriting the rulebook for what a music biopic can achieve at the global box office. Starring Jaafar Jackson as his late uncle, the Lionsgate production emerged as one of the biggest theatrical events of the year, drawing massive crowds for its concert recreations of iconic songs including “Billie Jean,” “Thriller,” and “Beat It.”
The film opened to a record-shattering $97 million domestically and $217 million globally in its first weekend of release, smashing the previous best start for a biopic and towering above the $51 million opening once posted by ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in 2018. Audiences rewarded the film with an A-minus on CinemaScore and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, even as critics remained divided over its softer handling of some chapters in Jackson’s life.
Now, the final chapter of this box office story is playing out in Japan, and the numbers are already causing jaws to drop. Before its nationwide release in the country, ‘Michael’ held a series of limited early access IMAX screenings across just 62 locations, and the King of Pop delivered. According to tracking shared by @FrancescaH on X, those preview screenings grossed $700,000 across the weekend, working out to a staggering average of over $11,000 per theater. With the film set to open wide across Japan the following weekend, the path to cinema history is now very real.
Box office analyst Luiz Fernando’s data places the film’s audience word-of-mouth score from Japanese viewers at a stellar 4.2 stars, a figure that precisely mirrors the reception ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ earned during its own initial launch cycles in the country, a film that went on to generate a lifetime cume of $114 million in Japan alone. That precedent is precisely why the industry is watching the Japanese rollout so closely.
Heading into its seventh weekend globally, ‘Michael’ stands at approximately $897.9 million worldwide, already surpassing both ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ and ‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2’ to become the highest-grossing film in Lionsgate history. The film now trails ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’s’ all-time music biopic record of $910.8 million by roughly $13 million, a gap that Japan’s wide release on June 12 is widely expected to close.
The Japanese market carries enormous weight in this calculation, given that Jackson’s 2009 concert documentary ‘This Is It’ earned $57 million in Japan alone out of its $268 million worldwide haul, underscoring just how deeply the country’s audiences connect with the King of Pop’s legacy. Trade analysts have been pointing to Japan’s surging pre-sale momentum as the definitive driver that could push ‘Michael’ past ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to become the highest-grossing musical biopic in cinematic history.
A sequel is already in early development, with Lionsgate and the film’s creative team in preliminary discussions about continuing the story of Jackson’s life, suggesting the studio has no intention of letting this franchise momentum slow down anytime soon. Japan’s nationwide opening on June 12 is expected to be the final push that carries the film past the billion-dollar milestone, a threshold no biopic has ever crossed in cinema history.
Whether you think ‘Michael’ deserved its record-breaking run or believe the billion-dollar finish line is still a stretch, there is no denying that Japan is about to deliver the verdict, so what do you think: will Jaafar Jackson and the King of Pop’s legacy finally make ‘Michael’ the first biopic to hit $1 billion, and does it deserve to be?
