In a multiplex off the Champs-Élysées, the screen flickers to life with a grainy recreation of a 1969 Ed Sullivan Show appearance. A child in a wide-lapelled suit belts out ‘I Want You Back’ with startling fidelity. The audience, a mix of nostalgic older fans and curious teenagers, leans forward. This is the opening of Michael, Antoine Fuqua’s biopic of Michael Jackson, and it is a scene that has now been witnessed in over 65 international markets, propelling the film to a global box office total of $977.4 million and unseating Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as the highest-grossing biopic of all time.

The record, confirmed by studio figures on 28 June, caps a remarkable ten-week run that began in April with a $217 million global opening weekend—the largest ever for a music biopic. Domestically, the Lionsgate release has earned $370.2 million, while international markets, handled by Universal, contributed $607.2 million. In France, it is now the most successful biopic in the country’s history; in Brazil, it has become the highest-grossing Universal title ever. The film’s performance has been buoyed by repeat viewings from devoted fan communities and a marketing campaign that foregrounded meticulous recreations of Jackson’s concert spectacles and music videos, from the moonwalk to the ‘Thriller’ choreography.

The cultural calculus behind Michael’s success is inseparable from what it omits. The film traces Jackson’s arc from the Jackson 5 to his coronation as the King of Pop, but ends abruptly in 1988, before the first public allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced. According to reports in the trade press, an earlier cut addressed the 1993 investigation, but lawyers for Jackson’s estate insisted on its removal, forcing $50 million in reshoots. The result, as Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent wrote in a one-star review, is a “ghoulish, soulless cash grab” that “eradicates anything that might indicate intent or agency.” Critics in North America and Europe have largely echoed this unease, yet audiences have flocked to a version of Jackson that is all glitter and no shadow.

Viewed from London, where the film has taken £70 million, or from Mexico City, where it has surpassed $30 million, the phenomenon speaks to a broader appetite for musical biopics that function as heritage cinema—spectacle-driven, built around catalogue hits, and often scrubbed of complexity. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) set the template with $911 million worldwide, and Michael has now exceeded it by $66 million. The film’s ability to draw crowds in 40 international markets for longer than Bohemian Rhapsody did, including Brazil, France, and Mexico, suggests that the Jackson brand, carefully curated, retains a formidable global pull.

In the end, the image that lingers is not of the man but of the meticulous illusion: Jaafar Jackson, the singer’s nephew, executing a perfect moonwalk under a cascade of stage lights, while the real, complicated figure remains somewhere off-screen, in the unlit wings. Lionsgate, which has seen Michael become its highest-grossing release ever, surpassing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, is already considering a sequel. For now, the King of Pop reigns again, not in sound, but in silence about the parts of his story the estate would rather forget.