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The Michael Jackson biopic Michael has officially dethroned the Freddie Mercury film Bohemian Rhapsody as the highest-earning music biopic in cinema history, crossing $911.9 million at the worldwide box office.

Lionsgate and the money

Lionsgate shared the figures with Rolling Stone, revealing the film has pulled in $358 million domestically and an additional $553 million from international markets — and that tally doesn’t yet account for the most recent weekend’s earnings. For context, the 2018 Queen biopic grossed $910 million globally during its theatrical run, a performance that also earned star Rami Malek the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Michael traces Jackson’s formative years alongside his brothers in the Jackson 5, continuing through his landmark 1988 Bad World Tour. The film has proven to be a massive commercial success in spite of lukewarm critical reception and public controversy surrounding its choice to sidestep the child sexual abuse allegations that dogged Jackson in his later years.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the filmmaker behind Training Day, the biopic has also ignited a renewed wave of enthusiasm for Jackson’s music catalog. Thriller climbed all the way to number seven on the Billboard 200, and Jackson’s solo recordings set a career record with 137.5 million official on-demand streams during the week of April 24–30 in the United States alone — a staggering 146 percent jump over his previous streaming peak. His work with the Jackson 5 and the Jacksons across several decades also experienced a notable boost, racking up 10.1 million streams in a single week, a 135 percent increase from the week prior.

For the Jackson estate, the film’s box office triumph represents a hard-fought win following an extraordinarily turbulent road to production. Among the complications: filmmakers were legally prohibited from depicting abuse allegations made by accuser Jordan Chandler, a restriction that forced a complete overhaul of the film’s third act and pushed the release date back by nearly a year.