‘Michael’ Is Getting an Official Streaming Release
The record-breaking biopic arrives on home screens this August.
Summary
The Michael Jackson biopic Michael will make its exclusive streaming debut on Starz beginning August 10
The film arrives across all Starz apps and on-demand platforms, with a same-day linear premiere on the Starz channel
Starz secured the film as its first exclusive streaming home following the biopic's theatrical and digital release windows
Michael, the record-breaking Michael Jackson biopic, is heading home, with Starz set as its first exclusive streaming home beginning August 10. The move caps a theatrical run that turned the Antoine Fuqua film into a genuine box office phenomenon, and it arrives with a same-day linear premiere on the Starz channel.
The streaming date lands atop a run few expected the film to have. Michael opened April 24 to $97.2 million USD domestically and roughly $217 million USD worldwide, the strongest debut ever for a musical biopic, then kept climbing until it pushed past $1 billion USD globally. Along the way it overtook Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddie Mercury and Queen film that had long held the music-biopic record at $911 million, and it also surpassed Oppenheimer to stand as the highest-grossing biopic of any kind. For Lionsgate, the picture became the studio’s biggest earner in its history.
That scale is striking given the film’s reception. Critics were split on Michael, yet audiences responded on a different register entirely, handing it an A- CinemaScore and a 97 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The gap between the reviews and the returns has become part of the film’s story, reopening a familiar debate about what mainstream audiences actually want from a biopic and how much of the result reflects Jackson’s enduring cultural pull decades into his legacy.
The production leaned into that legacy directly. Fuqua directs from a script by John Logan, with Graham King producing, and the casting keeps the story close to the family, as Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson plays the lead in his film debut, with Juliano Valdi portraying Michael as a child. The ensemble surrounds him with Colman Domingo and Nia Long as Joe and Katherine Jackson, Miles Teller as longtime manager John Branca, Kat Graham as Diana Ross and Larenz Tate as Motown founder Berry Gordy. The narrative arcs from the Jackson 5 era of the 1960s to the “Bad” tour of the late 1980s, tracing the rise that made him the King of Pop.
