Michael Jackson Biopic 'Michael' Hits Starz After Historic $1B Box Office Run

The biggest biopic in Hollywood history is now in your living room. "Michael," the Lionsgate film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, began streaming exclusively on Starz on August 10 after one of the more remarkable theatrical runs in recent memory.

The numbers are not small. According to Deadline, "Michael" opened April 24 to $97.2 million domestic and $217 million worldwide, the best opening weekend ever for a musical biopic. It kept going from there. As reported by Music Observer, the film grossed $1.02 billion worldwide over a 108-day theatrical run, first surpassing "Bohemian Rhapsody" ($910 million) as the highest-grossing music biopic ever, then passing Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" ($976.7 million) to become the highest-grossing biographical film of any kind. It's now the second film of 2026 to cross a billion dollars, sitting behind only "Toy Story 5."

The studio had a tight distribution path planned. As Forbes noted, the film moved to premium video on demand in June before the Starz window opened August 10, with Lionsgate's long-standing deal routing its titles to Starz first for streaming. And per CBR, which tracks FlixPatrol data, the film hit the platform and immediately became its most-watched title, knocking out "Power Book III: Raising Kanan" and other Starz staples from the top spot.

So what's actually in it? Fuqua's film, as Variety reported, covers Jackson's career from his years in the Jackson 5 through the "Bad" tour of the late 1980s. It does not touch the Thriller era or the later, more contested chapters of his life, a choice that had its own complicated backstory: The Hollywood Reporter previously reported that an earlier version of the script was retooled after it included a dramatization of an accuser who had a settlement with the estate prohibiting such portrayals. The film ends earlier and, by design, cleaner. A second film covering the rest of Jackson's career is in development.

At the center of all of it is Jaafar Jackson, the pop icon's nephew, making his feature film debut. Critical response has been mixed-to-warm on the film overall, but on Jaafar himself the notices have been consistently strong. As Variety's Owen Gleiberman wrote, per TheGrio, the newcomer captures "the look, the voice, the electrostatic moves" and the contrast of fragility and toughness that defined his uncle. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 97%, according to Deadline, and the CinemaScore was an A-. That gap between critics and audiences is familiar territory for the musical biopic genre, which tends to get picked apart by reviewers for the same sins it keeps committing and then rewarded anyway by people who want to spend two hours with the music.

Colman Domingo plays Joe Jackson, Kat Graham plays Diana Ross, Larenz Tate takes on Berry Gordy, and Miles Teller fills out an industry-side role. It's a stacked cast around a first-timer, and based on the receipts, audiences decided that was enough.

The streaming arrival was expected. What's worth watching now is what Lionsgate does with the sequel. The first film got to a billion by staying in comfortable, crowd-pleasing territory. The Thriller years, the trial, the last decade of Jackson's life: that's harder material. As Music Observer put it, how the follow-up handles those chapters will determine whether Lionsgate can replicate the commercial formula or whether the more complicated story resists the same treatment entirely. That's the more interesting question. For now, "Michael" is on Starz, it's the most-watched thing on the platform, and it got there by being exactly what it set out to be.

Sources cited:
- Deadline (https://deadline.com/2026/07/michael-streaming-date-1237004628/)
- Music Observer (https://musicobserver.com/michael-arrives-on-starz-after-becoming-the-first-biopic-to-cross-1-billion-at-the-global-box-office/)
- Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/timlammers/2026/07/27/michael-streaming-strategy-shifts-to-starz-after-crossing-1-billion-at-box-office/)
- CBR (https://www.cbr.com/michael-jackson-biopic-starz-streaming-success-august-2026/)
- Variety (https://variety.com/2026/film/news/michael-streaming-release-date-michael-jackson-starz-1236757504/)
- TheGrio (https://thegrio.com/2026/07/29/michael-jackson-biopic-streaming-date-starz/)
- The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/michael-jackson-biopic-spring-2026-release-1236327611)