Seventeen years ago this month, something unusual happened at movie theaters all over the globe.
A film called “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” opened on October 28, 2009. It was stitched together from the rehearsal footage Michael shot while getting ready for his big London shows, the ones that never got to happen.
Here’s the first surprising thing. It wasn’t supposed to stick around. The studio planned a short, limited run, just a couple of weeks, from late October into the middle of November. A quick visit and then gone.
Fans had other ideas.
Demand was so strong that Sony actually moved the opening up by two days, bumping it from October 30 to October 28 because people couldn’t wait. The movie opened in 110 territories around the world all at once.
A rehearsal that shows how hard he still pushed himself
Watch this clip of him working through “Earth Song.” Keep in mind this was only rehearsal, with no crowd and no pressure. He’s giving it everything anyway. That’s the whole reason the film connected with so many people.
Those two weeks turned into much more. The run got stretched by three more weeks in North American theaters, finally wrapping up on December 3. Fans just kept showing up.
And the money told the story. Columbia reportedly paid around $60 million for the rehearsal footage, which sounded like a huge gamble at the time. That gamble paid off in a big way. The film went on to pull in $267.9 million worldwide.
So what’s the world record?
Guinness World Records lists “This Is It” as the highest-grossing documentary film ever made. No documentary before it or since has matched what Michael’s rehearsal tapes did at the box office.
There’s a second record too. When the film came out on DVD, it sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first week in the United States alone. That set a record for a music DVD.
Think about the whole arc of it. A set of private practice sessions, never meant for the public, became the best-selling music DVD and the top-earning documentary in history.
Not bad for a film that was only going to play for two weeks.
If you’ve never sat down with “This Is It,” the clip above is a fine place to start. It’s Michael at work, doing the thing he did better than anyone.