At his big London press conference in March 2009, Michael signed off with three words fans never forgot. See you in July. The This Is It shows were set to open that summer, and for a moment it felt like the start of a comeback nobody thought they’d actually live to see.
July came. The shows didn’t. He passed away on June 25, 2009, just weeks before the first night, and that cheerful little goodbye turned into a promise the world assumed could never be kept.
The ‘see you in July’ moment from his 2009 press conference
Fast forward to July 2026. A film simply called Michael was in cinemas around the world, telling his life story, with his own nephew Jaafar Jackson playing him and Antoine Fuqua in the director’s chair. Nia Long and Colman Domingo played his parents. And that month, according to the box office figures reported at the time, it crossed one billion dollars worldwide.
If that number holds up, it made history. Reports called it the first biopic ever to reach a billion, passing even Bohemian Rhapsody and Oppenheimer. A movie about one man’s life, carried by a young man from his own family, pulled off a figure no film about a real person had ever touched.
It hits different watching Jaafar step into those shoes, especially once you know the backstory. He grew up in this family, around the music and the myth, and he’d heard the stories firsthand his whole life. So there’s a strange rightness to him being the one who finished what his uncle started, in the very month Michael had promised all those years ago.
Official trailer for the Michael biopic, starring Jaafar Jackson
Watch the trailer and it’s honestly a little uncanny. The walk. The voice. The way he holds his shoulders. For a lot of fans it was the closest thing to seeing him move again, and seeing it arrive right on schedule, in July, hit harder than anyone expected.
Michael said see you in July. It took seventeen years and his own nephew to make good on it. But the month he promised the world finally came back around, and this time it didn’t pass him by.