For most of their lives, the Jackson brothers kept the family story to themselves. They held on to the home movies, the old photos and the small private moments the public never got to see. All of it stayed behind closed doors.
That’s about to change.
On October 12, the company Banijay announced a new documentary about Jackie, Jermaine, Tito and Marlon Jackson. Two studios, Workerbee and Paper Route Studios, spent three years making it. It follows the brothers from a small house in Gary, Indiana all the way to the biggest stages in the world, and it looks at the parts Joe and Katherine Jackson played in getting them there.
The film comes as one 90-minute movie or a three-part series. It’s full of rare footage from the archives, material nobody has seen and new scenes of the surviving brothers still singing and performing together today. Benjamin Hirsch, the same man who made the Janet Jackson series, is directing. The company behind it says the family gave “never-seen-before access” to their private collection.
And there’s one piece of it that makes this film impossible to ever repeat.
Before we get to that, it helps to remember where all of this started. Long before the world knew Michael, five brothers from Indiana sang together and changed music for good.
The Jackson 5 as young boys on The Ed Sullivan Show
Watch how young they are here, and listen to the crowd the second they start singing. This is the family the new film goes all the way back to.
So what’s the part that can’t be repeated?
The documentary includes the last interview Tito Jackson ever gave before he passed away in 2024. His own words, his own memories, saved on film for good. For anyone who grew up with the Jackson 5, that alone is a reason to watch.
The brothers also opened their private archives for the very first time. So the film can show the family the way they really were, close up and at home, instead of the way the cameras usually caught them.
There’s no title for it yet. No network, no release date. The makers are only now showing it to buyers around the world at a big industry event, so the when and the where are still coming.
What’s certain is that four brothers decided it was finally time to tell their story their own way, with a voice in it the world won’t hear again anywhere else.
Keep an eye out for this one. When it gets a release date, you’ll want to be ready for it.