The new musical film about Michael Jackson has not merely broken the record for a music biopic opening; it has annihilated it, amassing $217 million globally in its first weekend. The figure, disclosed by distributor Lionsgate, effortlessly eclipses the $124 million launch of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in 2018 and even surpasses the $180 million debut of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ for a biographical picture of any sort. With the singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the title role, the production, directed by Antoine Fuqua, opened on 22 April and immediately demonstrated the undimmed, transnational pull of the Jackson brand.

Nowhere is that pull more measurable than on the UK album chart, where the film’s release has triggered a swift and pronounced resurgence. Industry monitors in London report that a wave of Jackson records, including the companion soundtrack ‘Michael: Songs From The Motion Picture’, the greatest-hits collection ‘Number Ones’, and the landmark LPs ‘Thriller’ and ‘Bad’, are all on course to land inside the Top 40. It amounts to a textbook case of cross-platform synergy, with cinema-screen spectacle funnelling audiences directly towards streaming platforms and physical sales.

Yet the commercial roar has drowned out a chorus of critical condemnation. Viewing the phenomenon from Europe, the picture looks less like a triumph of the form than a carefully managed act of erasure. London critics have been particularly forthright, with one broadsheet awarding a single star and denouncing the film for prioritising fan allegiance over an honest portrait of its subject’s life. The production’s most striking editorial decision is its wholesale omission of the child abuse allegations that shadowed Jackson’s later years, a departure from earlier plans that reportedly included the controversy. Italian commentators have refused even to dignify the project with the term “biopic”, calling it a lavish homage that halts abruptly before the star’s colossal debts and legal torments, advancing the widely held assumption that a sequel is being readied to address what this first instalment avoids.

From a Los Angeles vantage point, the critiques register as little more than background noise. Lionsgate’s leadership has pointed to extraordinary demographic breadth in the opening-weekend audience, and the numbers suggest a global fanbase fully prepared to separate the art from the artist—or simply to ignore the artist’s alleged transgressions. The result, carried in financial dispatches from Moscow to Milan, is a box office phenomenon that reaffirms Jackson’s singular hold on the popular imagination, no matter how fiercely the historical record is contested.

The commercial logic now pushes inexorably towards a sequel, yet the creative dilemma will only sharpen. Any second chapter must eventually confront the accusations that this first film so carefully silences. For the moment, the Jackson estate has engineered a potent symbiosis between multiplex and music chart, resurrecting catalogue sales and introducing the King of Pop to a cohort that knows him as a playlist staple rather than a tabloid fixture. Whether that resurgence can survive a more unvarnished accounting of his legacy is the question that will hang over whatever follows.