Smooth Criminal: Biopic trailer exposes a public happy to gloss over uncomfortable truth about Michael Jackson

If you scroll through the comments posted beneath the first trailer for the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic, you would never know that multiple, long-standing allegations of abuse have been levelled against the late singer.

Twelve hours after it was released, all the most upvoted comments wax lyrical about their excitement for the project, approval of the casting of Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar, in the role, or Jackson’s musical legacy and cultural impact.

For strident fans, that is the only narrative they will accept. Given the film is made with the approval of Jackson’s estate and family, it’s unlikely to be an unvarnished, tell-all of the many facets of Jackson’s life and public profile.

The movie will inevitably be controversial, as any conversation around Jackson continues to be divisive.

Sixteen years after his death, Jackson’s place in the culture is still litigated between those who either don’t believe the abuse allegations or have chosen to compartmentalise them versus those who feel uncomfortable celebrating a man accused of so many crimes.

Whether you can separate the art from the artist remains a contentious argument which changes depending on the person and the day. There is no fixed point.

How the culture has reckoned with the allegations against Jackson has also morphed over time. The first accusations were levelled against him in 1993, which he denied, and he was acquitted in 2005 of the specific criminal charges against him relating to Gavin Arvizo.

The 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland brought on a fresh furore against the backdrop of MeToo which triggered a better public understanding of the nuanced dynamics between those in positions of power and their alleged victims.

As the momentum of MeToo faded, so too did that renewed rage against Jackson, whose songs are back on the radio and on streaming playlists. The MJ the Musical stage production premiered on Broadway in 2021, won four Tonys, and toured the world including in Australia earlier this year.

Jackson too is an outlier case because of his immeasurable contributions to the music industry and specifically how he progressed the acceptance of Black artists within mainstream institutions. Before his popularity became undeniable, MTV was reticent to feature Black musicians.

While some sidelined artists across music, film, literature, media and more face challenges to stay relevant or reclaim their former stature, because of the plurality of people who can do what they do, Jackson was a singular personality.

But those are intellectual arguments and if you feel icky about him and his music, it’s difficult to suppress an emotional reaction. If a Jackson song comes on the radio, and your stomach churns and your mouth turns into a grimace, no amount of rationalising it will change your physical response.

This is the thorny context the biopic film will be released into next April.

If it is a one-sided story about a hero, that’s definitely going to poke the bear. If it’s not, that’s going to upset loyalists who are only interested in one version of the Jackson story.

Dan Reed, the filmmaker behind Leaving Neverland, which detailed abuse allegations against Jackson by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, read a draft of the Michael screenplay.

Reed called the script “startlingly disingenuous”, and told Variety in 2024, “Jackson is only ever seen caring for children with childhood cancer, or dancing with a little girl in a wheelchair, or tucking up multiple little boys, mostly his nephews, at sleepovers.

“It feels like the creators of the movie have been stuck in a room with (the estate’s co-executor and lawyer) John Branca and just told what to write.”

The script Reed read is probably not going to be the film that will be released. The Michael production has been a prolonged and, in some respects, a cursed one.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Magnificent Seven remake) wrapped filming in May 2024 and the film was initially slated for an April 2025 release, before it was pushed to October and now next year.

Behind the scenes, the movie ran into enormous legal issues. According to Puck, the film, as it was shot, would have included a subplot involving the 1993 accusations brought against Jackson by the parents of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler.

The movie would’ve portrayed Jackson as a victim the Chandlers were trying to exploit.

But after principal photography, the filmmakers discovered there was a legal agreement between the estate and the Chandlers that prohibits the former from dramatising the latter.

The film had to be completely reworked, including reshoots, to excise the storyline or the estate and the filmmakers would’ve opened themselves up to a lawsuit. The cost of reshoots was apparently borne by the estate.

The revised film now reportedly ends in the 1980s after Jackson rose to fame, thereby avoiding any child abuse allegations because of the timeline. Similarly, MJ the Musical is set one year before the first public accusations.

Footage shot in his later years will be held back and may be used if there is a follow-up film if Michael proves to be commercially successful.

Now that the first teaser trailer has been released, and the marketing machine is gearing up for the release, expect Jackson to be back in the conversation.

There may yet be more accusations. Last year, The Financial Times reported the estate secretly paid off five would-be accusers who emerged after Leaving Neverland aired.

Just this month, another new allegation was surfaced by Frank Cascio, according to reporting from Puck.

Cascio was a long-time Jackson confidante who has previously defended the singer, but he claimed in a new legal filing that the late singer had “groomed”, “brainwashed” and had “intimate contact” with Cascio’s siblings.

The Jackson estate sued Cascio in July and accused him of orchestrating a shakedown.

The Michael trailer is only the beginning, not only of the marketing push for a music biopic but of another round relitigating Jackson’s legacy.