Michael has divided critics and audiences, with a yawning gap in scores, but the latter will make or break the film, and the Michael Jackson biopic is about to be a record-setting smash hit.
Michael is already sailing past early expectations for its box office earnings. It has already earned $12.6 million in Thursday night domestic previews, which is similar to Project Hail Mary and actually above movies like Oppenheimer and Dune Part II.
After that, Michael's one-day Friday earnings are $40 million, which indicates a projected weekend of $88 million at the domestic box office alone. That puts it ahead of earlier estimates that were topping out at $70 million. Then, its global release means the ~$200 million budgeted film could earn $180 million this weekend alone.
This weekend haul for Michael would be almost 50% higher than the previous record holder for a musical biopic, where Straight Outta Compton made $60 million domestically. After that, it was Bohemian Rhapsody with $55 million. A film that racked up similarly near-perfect audience scores, Elvis, only managed $31 million in its opening weekend, and Michael is looking to triple that.
In terms of overall performance, there is little question that if Michael earns around $180 million globally, it will surpass the current second-highest-earning musical biopic, which is the aforementioned Elvis at $288 million. I'm not exactly sure how or why this happened, but Bohemian Rhapsody, in first place, made $910 million—$600+ million more. It may be tough for Michael to reach that, but with these early numbers and how much viewers seem to like it, I am certainly not going to say it's impossible. You might even go all the way to probable, given how this thing is starting out. To pass the highest-earning biopic ever, it would need to hit a billion, as Oppenheimer made $975 million.
Michael has turned into something of a "war on critics" with the declaration that the overall rating of a 38% Rotten Tomatoes score is "wrong," given that audience scores are now actually still increasing in time as thousands more reviews come in, putting it at a 97% rating. That may make it the largest split of any biopic.
There is unironically talk of a sequel, something you almost never see in the biopic space. Rather, there are usually multiple takes on one figure in different films. Here, a potential second film would explore the latter half of Jackson's life, the more controversial side, presumably with Jaafar Jackson still in the lead. But nothing like that has been officially announced yet, and we'll just sit and wait for the final weekend total.