In 2024, the creative team behind the Michael Jackson biopic got the kind of news that all Hollywood productions dread: Extensive reshoots were required. The film, announced in 2022 and delayed by the 2023 strikes, had finally begun production in January 2024 and principal photography had wrapped a few months later. Reshoots aren’t necessarily uncommon, but rather than needing to add or reconfigure a few scenes, Michael needed a drastic overhaul. The story wasn’t working. Not because of a convoluted plot or half-baked characters. Rather, the film director Antoine Fuqua had made was a gigantic legal liability, violating the terms of a settlement with one of the boys who’d accused Michael Jackson of sexual abuse.
In 1993, Jordan Chandler accused the King of Pop of molesting him. The allegations prompted a Los Angeles Police Department investigation, and Chandler’s family sued. Jackson eventually settled with the Chandlers in 1994 for about $20 million, after which the family stopped cooperating with the police and the case was closed with no charges. (Jackson repeatedly denied Chandler’s allegations, as well as all future accusations of sexual abuse.)
The Chandler saga was a key part of Fuqua’s original film, according to numerous reports. But it turned out the terms of the family’s settlement with Jackson forbade any kind of dramatized depiction of events surrounding his accusations.
Speaking recently with The New York Times, Larry Feldman, Chandler’s lawyer who negotiated the settlement, said the deal stipulated that “neither side was allowed to do anything about publicizing or communicating what occurred, except to the extent that the Chandler family was allowed to talk to the police and testify under oath.” After being told that Fuqua had not only incorporated the Chandler story into his original version of the film, but had largely painted Jackson as the victim of an extortion scheme by Chandler’s father, Feldman said, “That’s exactly what they couldn’t do.”
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Fuqua and the Michael creative team — including screenwriter John Logan and lead producer Graham King — reportedly learned about the settlement sometime in fall 2024. In November of that year, it was revealed that the film had been pushed from its original April 2025 release date to October 2025, though no reason was given.
In January 2025, Puck reported for the first time that the delay was tied to the Chandler storyline. It indicated that the clause in the Chandler settlement was discovered after a September 2024 Financial Times story that reported, for the first time, on new settlement payments the Jackson estate made to a different set of accusers in 2020. (These appear to be related to allegations made by the Cascio siblings, whose allegations against Jackson became public earlier this year. The Jackson estate has denied the accusations.)
According to Puck, the original Michael script started and ended with the Chandler story, making it the film’s key framing device and the main focus of its third act. Fuqua even shot an entire action sequence recreating the infamous 1993 raid on Neverland Ranch, which culminated in police officers strip-searching Jackson and examining his genitals to compare them with Chandler’s description.
“I shot him being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” Fuqua told The New Yorker. While the director said he did not know whether the allegations against Jackson were true, he expressed skepticism of the accusers. Chandler’s father, Evan, for instance, repeatedly threatened to “destroy” Jackson in secretly recorded telephone calls. (Evan died by suicide in 2009, not long after Jackson’s death.) “Sometimes,” Fuqua said, “people do some nasty things for some money.”
Fuqua also suggested there was often a double standard for Black artists like Jackson. “When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” the director said, noting Elvis met his wife, Priscilla, when she was 14, and they started living together when she was 17.
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Chanlder, of course, was not the only boy to come forward with allegations against Jackson. In 2003, Jackson was arrested and eventually charged on allegations that he abused 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo. The case went to trial in 2005, lasted three months, and eventually ended with Jackson’s acquittal on all charges.
Then, in 2013 and 2014 — several years after Jackson’s death, Wade Robson and James Safechuck sued the Jackson estate, accusing the pop star of sexually abusing them when they were children. While both suits were dismissed in 2017 because they fell outside the statute of limitations, a change of California law in 2020 led to their revival. Following a series of appeals, their combined case is now scheduled to go to trial this November. (Robson and Safechuck were also the main subjects of the 2019 documentary, Leaving Neverland.)
Most recently, in February, four adult siblings — Frank, Dominic, Marie-Nicole, and Aldo Cascio — sued the Jackson estate, calling Jackson “a serial child predator who, over the course of more than a decade, drugged, raped, and sexually assaulted each of the plaintiffs, beginning when some were as young as seven or eight.”
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Rather than contend with any of that, Michael, which finally hits theaters Friday, conspicuously ends in 1988 in the middle of the Bad tour and years before the first allegations were made. Initial reviews of Michael have not been favorable: “This isn’t really a biopic,” Rolling Stone film critic David Fear wrote. “This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.”
But fan excitement for Jackson has still never wavered. Early box office projections show Michael is set to be a box office smash, ensuring the King of Pop will continue to reign.
