Depending on your mileage, Michael Jackson is either one of the most influential and iconic performers of all time, a deeply troubled individual who succumbed to all the worst parts of fame, or something much worse.
So making a movie about his life was always going to feel like trying to thread a needle while hanging out of the window of a car doing 90mph… while somebody shoots as you.
It didn’t take long for the attempt to run into some legal troubles. Puck News reports that Michael, the biopic about the singer made in cooperation with his estate, has an issue to face. The trouble is that it is already shot. It completed filming last May.
Antoine Fuqua helms the $155 million-budgeted project, and the report says it faces rewrites and reshoots all because of the settlement paid out by Jackson to one of his accusers.
In 1993, Jackson was accused of improper sexual behavior with a thirteen-year-old male. He settled out of court for $25 million, but apparently the settlement agreement included clauses preventing the teenager and his family from ever being mentioned or dramatized in any future movie made about Jackson’s life.
OK, so just cut that section out, right? Wrong! John Logan’s script is said to use the entire episode as the “backbone” of the movie. The script has already been vetted and approved by Jackson’s estate, and this legal issue only came to light recently.
It renders huge swathes of the movie completely unusable, means the entire third act has to be trashed, and will mean extensive reshoots.
Another source has spoken to People magazine and says these rumors are exaggerated and it is not quite as dramatic as that:
“The Michael Jackson biopic is not in total chaos. The inflammatory headlines about the moving halting are simply not true. The film is moving forward, and reshoots are happening in March.”
Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson plays the lead role, alongside Colman Domingo, Nia Long, and Miles Teller. The current release date is October 3rd.