Nia Long Is Fighting Lionsgate Over a Pay Clause That the Studio Allegedly Broke After ‘Michael’ Reshoots Gutted Her Role
The box office triumph of ‘Michael’ may have broken records, but behind the scenes, another kind of fight is heating up. According to DiscussingFilm, citing a report from Puck News, Nia Long is currently in a dispute with Lionsgate over a clause in her contract that guaranteed she would not be paid less than the film’s supporting cast. The studio allegedly failed to honor that agreement.
The Michael Jackson biopic underwent extensive reshoots following a dispute between Lionsgate and the Jackson estate over the inclusion of allegations against the late pop star. That overhaul reshaped the entire structure of the film, narrowing its focus and cutting significant amounts of material that had already been shot. As DiscussingFilm reports, while Long appeared less prominently in the theatrical cut than co-star Colman Domingo, her role in the original script was actually larger.
After principal photography wrapped in May 2024, a clause was discovered in a legal settlement with one of Jackson’s accusers that legally restricted the film from depicting or mentioning those allegations. Lionsgate was required to remove the entire third act and undertook 22 days of reshoots in June 2025 to build a new ending, with the released version running just over two hours compared to the original 3.5-hour cut. Those changes fundamentally altered which characters and storylines survived into the final film, with the revamped narrative leaning far more heavily on the relationship between Michael and his father, Joe Jackson.
Long herself acknowledged in an interview with Variety that scenes between her and Jaafar Jackson were cut, including sequences filmed at Neverland Ranch, due to the time period the film ultimately chose to cover. She described watching hard-won material disappear from the final product as painful, though she expressed satisfaction with the film as it stands. The context of her pay dispute, however, adds a dimension to that experience that was not publicly known until now.
The film earned a record-setting $97 million domestically and $217 million globally in its opening weekend, the best start of all time for a music biopic. That commercial success only intensifies questions about how talent was compensated on a production that was radically restructured more than a year after cameras first rolled. Long plays Katherine Jackson, the matriarch at the emotional center of the story, and her work in the film has drawn praise from critics even as the movie itself received mixed reviews overall.
Reviewers noted that Domingo provides depth to a film that might otherwise lack it, his performance meshing with Long’s tender turn as matriarch Katherine Jackson. Despite that recognition, the pay dispute suggests that the way the production evolved left Long in a far more vulnerable contractual position than she had originally agreed to. The reshoots that boosted Domingo’s prominence appear to have shifted the balance in ways her deal was specifically designed to prevent.
The reshoots themselves proved extremely costly for the production, with director Antoine Fuqua and producer Graham King receiving expanded paydays after the overhaul, according to a Bloomberg report. Whether Nia Long will receive similar consideration remains unresolved. The dispute is a reminder that in Hollywood, legal clauses can cut both ways, and the same tangled production that required one set of contracts to be torn up may now be forcing another to be finally honored.
