Michael Jackson was a singular talent and deeply problematic figure in life, but in death he has been a money-making machine that can’t be stopped by negative reviews and many credible child abuse allegations.

The King of Pop’s estate and Lionsgate Films are laughing all the way to the bank, after the biopic on the singer’s life, Michael, opened to a record-breaking box office take of more than $330 million.

Despite critics around the world being almost universally agreed the film, which stars the singer’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, in the titular role, is mediocre at best.

Metacritic, which aggregates scores from the world’s most prominent media outlets, rates Michael at 38 per cent.

New York Magazine described the experience of watching it as “more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie”.

“Why bother to depict a human being when you can simply turn them into a product,” asked the reviewer from The Independent.

The New York Times declared it was merely a series of musical set pieces, “strung together in repetitive false-note ways that are insulting both to audience and subject”.

That there is a stark difference between public and critical sentiment is not new.

We see it time and time again, typically when a film’s popularity is fuelled by circumstances beyond the quality it exhibits between the opening and closing credits.

A recent and noteworthy example is Scream 7, the latest edition of the long-running meta-horror franchise that saw critics take a leaf from franchise villain, Ghostface, and brutally knife the film.

It went on to be the highest-grossing entry in the series.

Bankable IP is often a better predictor of box office success than critical response, just look at the Transformers franchise.

They might be robots in disguise, but there’s no hiding from the fact films such as Age of Extinction, Dark of the Moon and Revenge of the Fallen are among the biggest stinkers ever to grace the big screen.

They all made upwards of a billion dollars at the box office.

The equity Jurassic Park has built with audiences has allowed the decidedly average Jurassic World movies to similarly be billion-dollar blockbusters, whether they deserve to be or not (they don’t).

And all the Fifty Shades of Grey movies were hits, just like The Da Vinci Code and Suicide Squad, despite critics being lukewarm at best.

Arguing the box office success of these movies is proof critics don’t know what they are talking about would be a strange hill to die on, and, if we’re being honest, the record of punters to accurately identify quality cinema is patchy.

Films such as Fight Club, Shawshank Redemption and Blade Runner are now widely considered classics, yet bombed at the box office, because audiences didn’t believe they were worth bums on seats.

MJ fans, meanwhile, are flocking to theatres in droves, with audience reactions to the film going viral on social media, depicting people in sequinned gloves and fedoras dancing in the aisles and singing along to the lyrics.

Audience participation becoming a trending phenomenon has also been recently observed with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and A Minecraft Movie, but those releases didn’t have the darker side of the Jackson biopic.

Critical response aside, at least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, with the allegations demonstrating consistent and detailed stories.

Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. Jackson and his estate always maintained his innocence.

The box office success of Michael has revealed a fascinated dichotomy on social media, which, as recently as last month, was clamouring to convict anyone even mentioned briefly in the Epstein files in the court of public opinion.

The allegations against Jackson are considerably more credible than many of the Epstein conspiracies circulating around the internet, yet TikTok is currently full of videos by users stating the case for clearing the singer’s name.

As an aside, Jackson also appears in the Epstein files, with photographs of the singer with the convicted sex offender, and references to the financier arranging MJ to call an alleged victim on her 16th birthday.

The real irony of the biopic’s runaway success is Jackson was half a billion dollars in debt when he died.

Decades of child abuse allegations and bizarre behaviour – remember when he dangled his baby, Blanket, over a balcony in Berlin – contributed to his radioactive status as Wacko Jacko.

In a 2003 interview with 60 Minutes, Jackson insisted it was perfectly acceptable for an adult man to share a bed with children who weren’t his own. His words.

It finally looked as though the singer would be officially cancelled in 2019, after the release of the unflinching documentary, Leaving Neverland, which took its title from Jackson’s infamous compound in regional California.

In the film, Wade Robson and James Safechuck come forward to accuse the singer of abuse that began when they were children – 7 and 10 years old, respectively – in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.

The doco prompted radio stations around the world to pull hit songs such as Thriller, Bad and Smooth Criminal from the airwaves.

Following years of dismissals and appeals, Robson and Safechuck have won the right for to seek damages from Jackson’s estate before a jury in a civil trial, which is due in court later this year.

Even with all these facts on the public record, Michael is all but certain to climb to No.2 on the list of highest-grossing musical biopics of all time in just its second weekend.

It confirms Jackson’s status as the highest-earning dead celebrity, a dubious honour the Thriller hitmaker has enjoyed on Forbes’ annual ranking of such things for 13 of the past 16 years since he died at age 50 in 2009.

According to Forbes, Jackson’s posthumous earning last year alone totalled $140 million, courtesy of royalties from Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson ONE show in Las Vegas, which has been running for 13 years and counting, and Broadway’s MJ: The Musical, which has earned almost $300 million in ticket sales since its debut in 2022.

Buoyed by this success, Michael producer Graham King knew he would have a hit on his hands if he stayed true to the formula of his previous hit biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, the highest-grossing film in the genre ($1.3 billion).

That strategy? Shut up and play the hits.

An earlier version of director Antoine Fuqua’s movie opened in 1993, with police raiding the Neverland Ranch after Jackson was accused of sexually abusing 13-year-old Jordan Chandler.

The film then flashed back to recount the singer’s life story and build back up to the allegation and the Chandler family’s lawsuit, which Jackson would eventually settle for nearly $32 million.

The investigation was closed when the Chandler family subsequently stopped cooperating with prosecutors.

The plotline was scrapped, along with any mention of the child abuse accusations, after the Jackson estate, which served as a producer on the film, identified a clause in the Chandler settlement that prohibited the depiction or mention of him in any movie.

It forced Fuqua and the cast to embark on reshoots costing tens of millions of dollars, removing any trace of child abuse allegations and ending the film in the late 1980s, just as Jackson was beginning his record-breaking Bad tour.

Fuqua, who previously directed Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning turn in 2001’s Training Day, addressed the allegations in an interview with The New Yorker.

The director said he didn’t know the truth behind Jackson’s alleged abuse of children, but noted, “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money”.

This suggestion infuriated Leaving Neverland filmmaker Dan Reed.

“It’s well-known that Jackson spent a long time with small-boy companions, including taking them into his bed at night and locking the door, which is undisputed – and that alone, if someone made a claim, is probably enough to convict him in a court of child sexual abuse – but with Jackson, none of this stuff seems to matter,” Reed said in a recent interview with Variety.

Jackson’s own daughter, Paris, who refused to be involved in the film, described the biopic as pandering “to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in a fantasy, and they’re going to be happy with it”.

“The thing about these biopics is it’s Hollywood. It’s fantasy land, it’s not real. But it’s sold to you as real … the narrative is being controlled, and there’s a lot of inaccuracy, and there’s a lot of just full-blown lies,” she posted on Instagram last year.

However, Reed said he wasn’t calling for Jackson to be cancelled.

“He’s such a cultural phenomenon that there’s nothing you can do to eclipse that,” Reed admitted to Variety.

“But what the movie does is creates a version of events that essentially portrays Wade, James, and others who’ve accused Jackson of child sexual abuse, as liars without actually articulating it.

“They’re saying that the reason Jackson liked children is because he’s an angel and just wanted to be nice to children, not that he wanted to have sex with them.”

The heavily sanitised movie does not even feature an epilogue card – common to the biopic genre – to acknowledge child sexual abuse allegations or even his death from an overdose of painkillers and sedatives.

It does, however, contain a slide that reads, “His story continues”, suggesting a sequel is in the works.

Whether that will unpack the troubled years of Jackson’s life remains to be seen.

Michael is in cinemas now.