The album at the center of this revival is The Essential Michael Jackson, a greatest hits compilation first released in 2005. It amassed more than 508,000 chart units in the UK during the first nine months of 2026, according to the Official Charts Company. The compilation spans five decades of recordings, drawing from landmark albums including Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous, giving both longtime fans and new listeners a single entry point to his catalogue.
Jackson has beaten contemporary pop stars Harry Styles and Olivia Dean to the UK’s best-selling album of 2026 so far, with the success of his billion-dollar biopic fuelling renewed interest in his music.
Sony Music reported in August that streams of Jackson’s catalogue had climbed to roughly four times their pre-release levels following the film’s success. The surge was particularly pronounced on streaming platforms, with individual tracks such as “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” registering record single-day stream counts in several markets. That number tells a story about who is watching the film and what they do afterward.
The renewed interest follows the success of Michael, the 2026 biopic starring Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, as the music legend. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the film crossed $1 billion in worldwide box-office revenue, becoming the first biopic to reach the milestone.
The film has generated $629.8 million overseas and $371.8 million domestically, bringing its global tally to $1.001 billion. No biopic in history had ever reached that number before it.
The movie opened to $97 million domestically and $217 million globally, shattering the opening weekend benchmark for musical biopics set by 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, which earned $60 million. The opening weekend figure also placed Michael among the top twenty widest debuts in domestic box office history, according to data from Comscore.
Among its records, Michael stands as the highest-grossing musical biopic, surpassing 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody with $911 million worldwide, as well as the biggest film based on a real person, overtaking 2023’s Oppenheimer at $975 million.
Jaafar Jackson, who made his acting debut in Michael, became the first lead actor to debut with over $1 billion at the box office. That record belongs exclusively to a man playing his own uncle.
The commercial scale of the result surprised even those who made it. Producer Graham King, who spent more than a decade developing the project, described the response as “beyond anything we modelled or anticipated.”
But the box office run was not without serious turbulence. After a clause was discovered in a legal settlement, references to the 1993 child sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson were removed, the third act was revised, and reshoots took place in June 2025, bringing the production budget to $155–200 million.
The Chandler saga had been a key part of Fuqua’s original film. But the terms of the family’s settlement with Jackson forbade any kind of dramatized depiction of events surrounding the accusations.
The finished film received generally negative reviews from critics, who praised Jaafar’s performance but criticized the story as “sanitized.” Audiences went anyway, in numbers that rewrote the record books.
Jaafar Jackson, speaking with GQ Middle East, said, “I think the second film will give even more insight from his point of view, because at the end of the day, the allegations are always from someone else’s.”
Lionsgate’s Adam Fogelson confirmed a timetable for the sequel, saying, “We are targeting a production start towards the end of this year or early next.” Seventeen years after his death, Michael Jackson remains the best-selling album artist in the UK and the engine behind a franchise still in motion.
