Are They Really Going to Make a ‘Michael’ Sequel?

“His Story Continues”

That’s the title card that concludes the new Michael Jackson biopic. Michael covers just the first 30 years of Jackson’s life; after a very short Walk Hard-esque framing scene at a 1988 concert from the Bad tour, it flashes back to his childhood in Gary, Indiana, then follows his evolution from 10-year-old Jackson 5 frontman to the King of Pop. The final sequence takes place back at that concert in 1988, with Jackson performing at a massive stadium in London. And then “His Story Continues” appears on the screen, and the end credits begin to roll.

It’s pretty unusual for a biopic to cover just two-thirds of a famous celebrity’s life. It’s even rarer to do it when so many consequential things happened in that celebrity’s life in his later years. And Jackson’s later years were certainly notable: More hit albums but also multiple marriages and children, tabloid rumors, and allegations of sexual abuse — none of which are even hinted at in Michael.

That Wasn’t The Original Plan

A new article on Michael and the Jackson estate in The New York Times Magazine details Michael’s early screenplay and the subsequent reshoots. Rather than ignore Jackson’s later controversies, the original script “went to great lengths to exonerate Jackson, portraying him as the victim of a shakedown by the family of the first child to come forward [with allegations of abuse], Jordan Chandler.”

According to a New Yorker profile of Michael director Antoine Fuqua, the film originally began with “a reenactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, Jackson’s home and personal amusement park, on the far outskirts of Santa Barbara. After searching the premises, officers had examined and photographed Jackson’s body, to compare it with descriptions from Jordan Chandler.” The film would then flash back to Jackson’s own childhood and his rise to stardom.

That was the plan, at least. It was only after Fuqua had already shot the Neverland opening that the production discovered that Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family included a clause that stated “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.”

Lionsgate, Michael’s distributor, ultimately delayed the movie by an entire year while they reworked the material they had and reshot entirely new scenes. The Neverland Ranch sequence was removed entirely. (The infamous home and private amusement park never appears onscreen in the film; Jackson purchased it the same year as that concert in London.)

But one of the rumors that’s bubbled around the film during its long post-production claims Lionsgate eventually accumulated so much footage that they had designs on turning Michael into a multipart biopic. (“Sources are telling us that Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, from Lionsgate, with a near four-hour cut, could be split into two movies,” Deadline wrote in April of 2025.)

The fact that Michael ends with “His Story Continues” won’t do anything to dispel those rumors.

Are They Really Going to Make a Sequel?

The New York Times Magazine piece includes this statement from Lionsgate about the scrapped opening and the subsequent reshoots:

The unusual circumstances gave us the opportunity to shoot more material for what is effectively a Part 1 — the making of a king — while preserving the opportunity to tell more story in a subsequent film or films.

While that’s not an official announcement that Michael 2 is coming, it does suggest that if Michael is a hit (and experts predict it will be a huge one) that idea is very much on the table.

But my further prediction would be that a sequel doesn’t happen, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars Michael makes at the box office. Or at least, it won’t be made by this set of filmmakers, working in concert with Jackson’s estate to make an authorized biography.

READ MORE: ScreenCrush’s Full Review of Michael

Why a Sequel Can’t Happen

The Chandler settlement, and the scramble to recut Michael, ended up working to Lionsgate and Fuqua’s advantage. It gave them cover to make a biopic that avoids all of the allegations against Jackson. They could craft a film where Michael Jackson (Jaafar Jackson) is the victim, and where his father Joe (played by Colman Domingo) is the abuser. They could limit their scope to just Michael’s rise to stardom and all of his biggest hits. It wasn’t that they wanted to make a hagiography. They almost had to make one. After all, they were legally disallowed from addressing the Chandler incident onscreen.

That excuse won’t work a second time. The final two decades of Jackson’s life were far too messy to focus just on his chart-topping hits — which were also far less plentiful in that period. The music alone wouldn’t prop up a sequel the way “Thriller” “Billie Jean” and “Rock With You” and “ABC” prop up Michael.

Plus, the same Chandler family settlement that forced all those changes to Michael because they couldn’t publicize or communicate what occurred would still impact any potential sequel as well. How do you make a movie about Michael Jackson’s life in the 1990s without at least mentioning the massive story that engulfed his entire public persona for the majority of the decade?

Even if you could, I doubt the people involved with Michael would want to. As that aforementioned Times Magazine profile details, the biopic is part of a canny strategy of image rehabilitation that his estate’s managers have undertaken since Jackson’s death in 2009. At that time, Jackson was (per that article) “at least $450 million in debt.” His “Q score — a measurement of a celebrity or brand’s consumer appeal — had been dropping since 1995 until, by the end of his life, no recorded score existed.”

In the years since Jackson’s death, his estate has mounted a Cirque du Soleil built around his music, and a jukebox Broadway musical, MJ, that’s already been running for three years. (It also takes place entirely prior to Chandler’s accusations, with a frame story set around the rehearsals for the Dangerous tour in 1992.) It’s a comeback almost without comparison in the history of pop culture scandals.

Now Michael stands to become one of the biggest movies of 2026. It presents a version of Michael Jackson who is kind, sensitive, brilliant, and free of the slightest whiff of ignominy. It wipes his slate clean. After that, why would you make a sequel that dredges up all the disturbing episodes from his life that you’ve worked so hard to remove from the public’s memory?