The biggest biopic in cinema history has a problem it has not solved, and now the man who played the lead has said out loud that he wants the sequel to confront it.
Jaafar Jackson, who portrayed his own uncle in the $1 billion film Michael, has said he hopes a second film will go into the harder parts of Michael Jackson’s life — including the child sexual abuse allegations that shadowed his later career.
To understand why this is news, you need to know what the first film left out. Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and released on 24 April 2026, tells the story of Jackson’s rise — the Jackson 5, the breakout solo years, and the world-conquering success of the eighties. Then it stops. It ends around 1988, before the events that dominated the rest of his life. Critics who otherwise praised Jaafar’s performance described the story itself as sanitized, and the omission became the film’s single biggest talking point.
The reason for the gap is more complicated than a simple creative choice, and it is genuinely strange. Scenes dealing with the allegations had actually been filmed. According to reporting in Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, the original third act included a dramatization of Jordan Chandler, who accused Jackson in 1993. Then, after Fuqua had already handed in his director’s cut, a clause was discovered in an old legal settlement stating that Chandler would never be depicted on screen. The material had to go. Fuqua’s description of the day he found out was blunt: “That was a tough day.” The Jackson estate reportedly covered around $50 million in reshoots, and the film’s release was pushed from November 2025 to April 2026.
Jaafar Jackson Finally Speaks Out About Michael 2
That is the context Jaafar was speaking into. He has acknowledged that the sequel’s script is still being written and that he does not have final say over what goes in it. But he made his own preference clear: he wants Michael’s own perspective to be at the center of how those years are told, rather than the film simply avoiding the subject. He described the first movie as a story about Jackson’s roots, showing “who he was as a human being first,” and said he hopes a second film carries the same humanizing approach into the more difficult years.
His co-star Colman Domingo, who played Joe Jackson, has framed it similarly, describing the first film as covering “the making of Michael” and suggesting that a sequel picks up the story from there.
It is worth stating the factual position plainly, because both sides of this argument are loud.
Michael Jackson denied all allegations of sexual abuse throughout his life. He was acquitted on all counts at his 2005 criminal trial, and was never convicted or found legally liable in any case against him. The Jackson estate, which co-produced the film, has consistently rejected the allegations. On the other side, Dan Reed — who directed the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, featuring two men who say they were abused as children — reviewed an early draft of the biopic’s script and called it a “complete whitewash.”
Commercially, none of the controversy hurt it. Michael has grossed over $1 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing biopic ever made and Lionsgate’s biggest release in the studio’s history. And the sequel is already moving: studio chief Adam Fogelson has said filming could begin as early as late 2026 or early 2027, aiming for release between late 2027 and 2028, partly built on footage already shot for the first film. Whether it does what Jaafar Jackson is asking for remains, for now, an open question.