Michael (2026) BLAKWATCH Movie Review: A Loving, Emotional Celebration of the King of Pop
- Teacher Nine
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
Director: Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer, Emancipation)
Writer: John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator, Skyfall)
Studio: GK Films / Lionsgate
Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
Genre: Biographical Drama / Music
Starring
Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson
Juliano Krue Valdi as young Michael Jackson
Colman Domingo (Rustin, Sing Sing) as Joe Jackson
Nia Long (Love Jones, The Best Man) as Katherine Jackson
Larenz Tate (Menace II Society, Love Jones) as Berry Gordy
Kendrick Sampson (Insecure) as Quincy Jones
Laura Harrier (BlacKkKlansman, Spider-Man: Homecoming) as Suzanne de Passe
Miles Teller (Whiplash, Top Gun: Maverick) as John Branca
Michael Movie Review: Why I Had to See This One
I grew up with Michael Jackson.
And when I say that, I mean Michael was one of those artists whose life had so many distinct eras that you can almost measure time by which Michael Jackson existed at the moment.
Jackson 5 Michael. Off the Wall Michael. Thriller Michael. Bad Michael. And then all the different versions that came afterward.
For somebody who only lived to be 50 years old, Michael Jackson lived an incredibly busy existence. Being Michael Jackson was clearly something he loved, but watching his life unfold also made one thing painfully obvious: being Michael Jackson was not easy.
So I went into Michael already carrying decades of memories and feelings about this man.
And this movie understands that people like me are sitting in the audience.
It understands what Michael meant to his fans.
Is Michael (2026) Worth Watching?
If you're a Michael Jackson fan, yes.
Go see it.
If you're interested in Michael Jackson's life, yes.
If you enjoy a good music biopic, yes.
Michael is fan service in many of the right ways. It's emotional, nostalgic, colorful, musical and clearly made by people who understand the enormous cultural weight of the person they're depicting.
It's not Malcolm X. It's not Ray.
Those remain part of my personal gold standard for biographical filmmaking because the performances are extraordinary, but the movies themselves are also extraordinary.
Michael doesn't quite reach that level for me.
But it gets much closer than it could have.
And that's important because there are about a thousand different ways somebody could have messed up a Michael Jackson movie.
The biggest reason this one works is Jaafar Jackson.
There are moments where I forgot I wasn't looking at Michael.
And considering who we're talking about, that's an incredible accomplishment.
This is also an emotional movie. I cried several times, particularly during scenes involving young Michael.
So if Michael Jackson meant something to you, prepare yourself. This one might get you.
SPOILERS AHEAD
From this point forward, I'm discussing specific events, performances and choices made by the film. If you' d rather watch the move first and come back- you can watch it here on Amazon: Watch "Michael" .
How Well Does Michael Tell Michael Jackson's Story?
Making a movie about Michael Jackson is a ridiculous undertaking.
How do you squeeze that life into two hours?
Michael wasn't simply somebody who became famous, made some records and went on tour.
He started performing professionally as a child. He became the centerpiece of one of the most important family groups in music history. Then he somehow became even bigger by himself.
Then Thriller happened.
Then Michael Jackson essentially became his own category of celebrity.
So John Logan's screenplay has to make choices constantly about what stays and what goes.
For the most part, I think those choices work.
The movie moves through Michael's childhood, the Jackson 5 years, Motown, his growing independence, his solo career, Off the Wall, Thriller, Motown 25, the Victory Tour, the Pepsi accident and ultimately the Bad era without making the whole thing feel like somebody is hitting fast-forward through a Wikipedia page.
That's harder than it sounds.
The movie also wisely keeps Michael at the center. We're occasionally allowed into conversations happening around him, but emotionally, this is Michael's story.
We watch this shy, introverted, unusually gifted child gradually realize that the creative world around him isn't large enough for what he wants to become.
That's one of the strongest arcs in the movie.
Michael keeps outgrowing his shoes.
First he's bigger than the neighborhood talent-show version of his life. Then the Jackson 5 becomes bigger. Then Michael becomes bigger than the limitations being placed on the group. Then his imagination becomes bigger than the machinery surrounding him.
The movie understands that tension.
Where I have problems is with what gets sacrificed along the way.
Why Are Janet Jackson and Diana Ross Missing From Michael?
This is probably my biggest problem with the movie.
There are people missing from Michael Jackson's life who are simply too important for their absence not to be noticeable.
The biggest one is Janet Jackson. Janet doesn't appear in the movie, and that feels strange.
By the later portion of the timeline, we're talking about another enormously important artist emerging from the same family. You don't need to stop Michael and suddenly make a Janet Jackson movie inside it, but completely removing her presence leaves a noticeable hole in the Jackson family dynamic.
There is some real-world context here: Janet reportedly declined to participate in the production.
That explains the filmmaking situation better. It doesn't make her complete absence invisible inside the movie.
Diana Ross is another glaring omission for me.
And because Diana isn't part of the story, The Wiz isn't meaningfully explored either.
That's unfortunate because The Wiz isn't merely another credit on Michael Jackson's résumé. Michael's relationship with film, fantasy, character and transformation becomes enormously important to the artist he eventually becomes.
Think about Thriller.
Think about Smooth Criminal.
Think about Remember the Time.
Think about Ghosts.
Michael didn't merely make music videos. He repeatedly turned songs into miniature cinematic worlds where he could become somebody or something else.
Seeing him play the Scarecrow in The Wiz matters within that artistic evolution.
The movie can't contain everything.
I understand that.
But those omissions still cost it something.
The Jackson 5 Deserved More Room
I also wish Michael's brothers had been allowed to become fuller characters.
The movie is called Michael. I understand where the spotlight belongs.
But the Jackson 5 weren't merely Michael Jackson's opening act before his "real" career started.
Their legacy is enormous.
And more importantly for this particular story, these are Michael's brothers.
I wanted a few more private moments between them. A few more conversations. Something that allowed us to understand their relationships with one another outside of rehearsal, performance and Michael's inevitable trajectory toward becoming a solo superstar.
The movie doesn't necessarily portray the brothers badly.
It grays them out.
Almost everybody surrounding Michael becomes brighter or dimmer depending on how necessary they are to Michael's development at that moment.
That keeps the movie focused.
But occasionally, I wanted the camera to let somebody else breathe.
How Accurate Is Michael (2026)?
This is another area where the movie loses points for me.
When you're making a biographical film about someone this well documented, taking unnecessary liberties with history becomes noticeable.
Bubbles is a good example.
I understand why the filmmakers want to establish Michael's relationship with animals early. It tells us something important about his personality and about the strange, private world he was building around himself.
But Bubbles has an actual history.
Michael didn't have Bubbles during his childhood.
That may seem like a tiny complaint, and comparatively it is. But when you're dealing with a real person's life, especially somebody whose history has been documented this obsessively, changing details that don't need to be changed bothers me.
There are other moments where events, chronology or the people responsible for particular developments have been compressed or altered for storytelling purposes.
None of these choices destroyed the movie for me.
But they are part of why I'm not giving it a 9 or a 10.
Michael's Visuals Understand Who Michael Jackson Was
Visually, this movie is beautiful.
It needs to be.
Michael Jackson was a visual spectacle.
The hair. The jackets. The glasses. The penny loafers. The socks. The glove. The poses. The choreography.
Michael didn't simply have songs associated with different periods of his career. He had entire visual identities.
And Michael understands that.
The earlier sections have the warmth and nostalgia you want from the '60s and '70s portions of the story. As Michael evolves, the visual world evolves with him. The production design also has the difficult job of recreating imagery that millions of people already know by heart.
Motown 25 is one of the obvious examples.
Michael performing "Billie Jean" and unveiling the moonwalk on national television isn't merely another scene from his life. It's part of pop-culture history.
The filmmakers understand that recreating moments like that requires precision.
Sometimes while watching the performance sequences, I stopped thinking about the recreation and simply started enjoying Michael Jackson again.
That's about the highest compliment I can give them.
Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson Is the Movie
Here we go.
Jaafar Jackson.
Michael Jackson's nephew, and Jermaine Jackson's son, was born to play this role.
I don't know how else to say it.
Sometimes a casting decision feels almost unfair.
Jamie Foxx playing Ray Charles.
Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X.
There are performances where everything that needs to line up somehow lines up at once.
Jaafar can act.
He can dance.
He can move like Michael.
He can speak like Michael.
He understands the physicality of Michael Jackson beyond simply hitting recognizable poses.
And importantly, he understands that Michael wasn't "Michael Jackson" every second of his life.
Jaafar reportedly spent enormous amounts of time studying the small things: how Michael spoke, laughed, reacted, sat around, became irritated, became playful and behaved when he wasn't performing.
You can see that work.
Michael Jackson had a very specific way of speaking, and the Jackson family has a recognizable Gary, Indiana cadence that would be easy to turn into caricature.
Jaafar doesn't.
He embodies it.
There's still something nobody can duplicate about Michael Jackson's movement.
Michael had a looseness, swagger and electricity that belonged specifically to him. The greatest impersonator in the world can imitate it, but there's still only one Michael.
Jaafar gets closer than anybody I've seen.
And there are moments, especially when he's simply talking, where the illusion becomes uncanny.
Juliano Krue Valdi as Young Michael Is Just as Important
The other crucial casting decision was young Michael.
Juliano Krue Valdi is excellent.
Those early scenes are some of the most emotionally difficult material in the movie because we know what this tiny kid eventually becomes.
We also know what fame costs him.
Watching young Michael deal with Joe's discipline, rehearsal, responsibility and the impossible expectations placed on him is painful precisely because he's still a child.
Those big brown eyes do a lot of work.
The movie doesn't need to turn Joe Jackson into a cartoon monster to communicate what Michael is experiencing.
It lets us see a child who wants friends, wants freedom and wants to be a kid while simultaneously possessing a gift so enormous that the adults around him understand his childhood is already becoming something else.
That's heartbreaking.
Colman Domingo and Nia Long Ground the Jackson Family
Colman Domingo has another difficult assignment as Joe Jackson.
Joe is effectively one of the antagonistic forces in Michael's life, but the movie doesn't flatten him into a mustache-twirling villain.
He's harsh. He's intimidating. He's demanding.
But the movie also lets us see his ideas about family, survival and legacy.
That complexity matters.
Nia Long takes a quieter approach as Katherine Jackson.
Katherine has always appeared publicly as a subdued, humble woman, but there's an obvious strength underneath that softness.
Long captures that nicely.
Her performance isn't loud. It doesn't need to be.
Between Jaafar, Valdi, Domingo and Long, the central Jackson family dynamic works.
Michael Is Really a Movie About Transformation
Underneath the music, fame and performances, the word I kept coming back to was transformation.
Michael is constantly outgrowing something.
His circumstances.
His group.
Other people's expectations.
His own insecurities.
The limitations of the music industry.
Even his physical appearance becomes part of this constant state of change.
But there's another theme underneath that:
freedom.
Michael wants the freedom to be strange.
The freedom to be sensitive.
The freedom to be ambitious.
The freedom to care about animals and children and fantasy worlds.
The freedom to create something nobody around him completely understands yet.
The movie repeatedly shows Michael gravitating toward people who are vulnerable, sick, misunderstood or different.
That's important to its characterization of him.
Michael himself feels different.
His childhood doesn't resemble anyone else's. His fame prevents normal relationships. Adults see talent, money and potential where a child might simply want companionship.
Fantasy becomes refuge.
And eventually Michael earns enough money to stop merely imagining that refuge and physically build one.
That makes the movie, strangely enough, inspirational.
It asks what happens when the thing that makes you an outsider is also the thing that makes you extraordinary.
Michael Jackson's Music Carries the Movie Through Time
Of course the soundtrack is incredible.
It's Michael Jackson.
But the music is doing more than providing familiar songs.
It's a timeline.
We remember different Michaels through different music.
"ABC" Michael isn't Thriller Michael.
Thriller Michael isn't Bad Michael.
And none of those versions are the Michael we eventually see during later stages of his career.
The songs carry us through those transformations.
The Jackson 5 material establishes one world. The Motown sound establishes another. Then Michael's solo catalog gradually takes control of the movie exactly as Michael gradually takes control of his own career.
The original score, composed by Lior Rosner, also works around music so culturally familiar that it would be foolish to compete with it.
Instead, the film frequently allows Michael's own musical language to reinforce the emotional meaning of scenes.
For somebody who has watched some of these performances enough times to know their rhythms almost from memory, hearing and seeing them recreated can be surreal.
The music isn't decorating Michael's story.
The music is Michael's story.
Hits: What Michael Gets Right
The biggest hit is obvious.
Jaafar Jackson.
Everything rests on that casting decision, and they nailed it.
The makeup, hair, wardrobe, choreography and production teams surrounding him deserve credit too because they're tasked with transforming one performer into multiple versions of one of the most recognizable human beings who ever lived.
The second major hit is the movie's spirit.
Michael is fun.
That matters more than it might sound.
You could make a devastatingly sad Michael Jackson movie without changing many facts.
His childhood was difficult. Fame isolated him. His appearance became a source of public ridicule. His relationship with his father left emotional scars. His Pepsi accident physically injured him. The press eventually treated him as a spectacle. His later life became consumed by controversy.
There is plenty of darkness available.
Instead, this first movie chooses joy without pretending the pain wasn't there.
That's smart.
There's whimsy here.
There's childhood.
There's music.
There's spectacle.
There's that strange little magical universe Michael seemed to carry around with him.
And then, when the painful moments arrive, they hurt.
Watching young Michael being disciplined by Joe hurts.
Watching the Pepsi accident hurts.
Hearing Michael scream after being burned hurts.
The movie earns those moments because it hasn't spent the previous two hours trying to emotionally beat you into submission.
It understands that Michael Jackson's story contains tremendous sadness.
It also understands why people loved him.
Misses: Where Michael Falls Short
My complaints aren't numerous, but they're significant enough to keep this from being a near-perfect movie for me.
First, the omissions. Janet Jackson's absence is glaring, even knowing there were behind-the-scenes reasons for it. Diana Ross is missing.
The Wiz is effectively missing.
The Jackson brothers could have been developed more.
Those aren't tiny pieces of Michael Jackson's early life.
Then there are the historical liberties.
Biopics always compress timelines. They combine events. They simplify relationships. I understand why.
But sometimes Michael changes something when I'm not convinced changing it actually improves the story.
That's where I start taking points away.
If something happened one way and depicting it accurately would accomplish exactly the same storytelling goal, just tell me what happened.
Especially with Michael Jackson.
We already have enough mythology surrounding this man.
His real life is interesting enough.
Why Michael's Critical and Audience Reception Is So Interesting
Here's where things get fascinating.
Audiences and professional critics did not react to Michael the same way.
At the time of this review, the movie holds a 38% Tomatometer score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes but a massive 97% score from verified audiences.
Metacritic shows a similar divide, with a 39 Metascore from professional critics compared with a considerably stronger 7.9 user score.
And I get the divide.
A lot of the criticism centers on the movie being too celebratory, too sanitized or too unwilling to interrogate Michael Jackson. I understand that argument.
I just don't think this particular movie has to be the prosecution's case against Michael Jackson.
This installment is primarily telling the story of his rise.
And as somebody who grew up watching and loving Michael, the audience response makes complete sense to me. People wanted to feel Michael again.
They wanted the music.
They wanted the performances.
They wanted that electricity.
They wanted to remember the period when a Michael Jackson premiere, album, performance or music video was an event.
And the movie gives them that.
That's probably why my reaction sits much closer to the audience score than the critic score.
I can recognize the movie's selectivity while still believing the thing it chooses to do, it does extremely well.
Michael's Legacy and the Challenge Facing the Sequel
The next movie has a much harder job. This is the easier half of Michael Jackson's life to celebrate.
Not easy to make, certainly. But easier to celebrate.
The later story contains the allegations, tabloid obsession, changes in Michael's appearance, increasingly intense public scrutiny and the strange relationship he developed with celebrity itself.
That's where the filmmakers are going to have to walk through fire.
Fans who loved this movie are going to be protective of Michael.
People who believe the allegations are going to scrutinize how they're handled.
People who don't believe them are going to do exactly the same thing from the opposite direction.
And somewhere in the middle, the filmmakers still have to make an actual movie.
If they can pull that off while maintaining the craftsmanship and emotional intelligence that worked here, I'll be impressed.
Because they've got me.
I'm ready to see where this goes.
BLAKWATCH Verdict: Is Michael Worth Watching?
Absolutely.
Watch it if you like:
Michael Jackson, music history, the Jackson 5, Motown, music biopics, performance-driven movies, nostalgic filmmaking and stories about artists fighting to become themselves.
Skip it if you don't like:
Biopics that compress history, movies that take liberties with real events, highly celebratory portrayals of their subjects, or Michael Jackson himself.
For Michael Jackson fans in particular, I think this is essential viewing.
And if you have younger people in your life who know Michael primarily as an icon from before their time, this is also a wonderful doorway into explaining just how enormous this man was.
There was a time when Michael Jackson doing practically anything became an event.
The clothes became iconic.
The glove became iconic.
The socks became iconic.
The sounds became iconic.
The dance moves became iconic.
Michael standing on his toes became iconic.
Michael Jackson didn't simply have a brand.
Michael Jackson was the brand.
And for two hours and seven minutes, Michael manages to resurrect enough of that feeling that I found myself forgetting I was watching somebody recreate it.
That's where the movie won me over.
It's not perfect.
The historical liberties bother me. The omissions bother me. Janet's absence bothers me. Diana Ross and The Wiz deserved room in this story. The Jackson 5 deserved a little more dimensionality.
That's the point and a half I'm taking away.
Everything else?
They pulled off something I wasn't entirely sure anybody could pull off.
They made Michael feel like Michael.
BLAKWATCH SCORE: 8.5/10
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MICHAEL 2026 MOVIE REVIEW
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