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Is truth determined<\/span> by the size of the audience it reaches?<\/p>\n If so, Michael<\/em>\u2014a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was\u2014intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s release has sparked a civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.<\/p>\n Musically, Jackson was in a class all his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists charted on Billboard and he became a recurring meme online, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 number one singles, countless awards, twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy was also defined by multiple allegations of sexual abuse, an occasionally eccentric personal life, and Jackson\u2019s on-record admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. \u201cThis guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,\u201d Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland<\/em>, the 2019 Emmy-winning HBO documentary about Jackson\u2019s alleged sexual misconduct, recently told the Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n Director Antoine Fuqua, who maintains Jackson\u2019s innocence, never intended to fully avoid the allegations that circled Jackson later in life. According to him, the original cut of Michael<\/em> included a reenactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, where Jackson was strip-searched to verify the physical description of his first accuser, Jordan Chandler. But the scene was ultimately scrapped along with the film\u2019s entire third act\u2014totaling $15 million in reshoots\u2014because of a legal clause in a settlement with Chandler that prohibited the depiction of his experience on screen.<\/p>\n The result is a film that stops abruptly in 1988 and erases the most controversial two decades of Jackson\u2019s life. Instead, the film emphasizes Jackson\u2019s musical legacy\u2014the story arc is structured around career-defining music moments, like the making of the \u201cThriller\u201d video\u2014over the more contentious aspects of his personal behavior.<\/p>\n Scrubbing the Neverland Ranch scene, but also choosing to completely write around any of Jackson’s alleged misconduct, is not surprising given that the Jackson estate had approval over the use of his music, essentially granting it veto power over the film\u2019s final cut. One argument that keeps surfacing on social media is that critics should judge Michael<\/em> on its own terms rather than on what they think it should have been. \u201cIt seems like people wanted a movie [that] was never going to exist,\u201d noted one X user. \u201cSo it was never going to be salacious or introspective\u201d<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s fans argue the allegations shouldn\u2019t eclipse his musical and artistic legacy, separating the artist from the work, while critics insist that a biopic should present a complete picture of Jackson, regardless of how unflattering that picture may be. As film critic Sean Burns characterized it on X, ending \u201cwith the release of Bad<\/em> is like ending an OJ biopic with him winning the Heisman.\u201d A good Michael Jackson movie, wrote the artist Harmony Holiday, \u201cwould be part tragedy, part farce,\u201d calling attention to how the film lacks the real kind of interiority that made Jackson so polarizing.<\/p>\n \u201cWatching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority,\u201d critic Alison Willmore noted in Vulture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n