• The Michael biopic has driven Jackson’s catalog to 181.6 million U.S. streams in a single week — his personal best by a wide margin
• Thriller has returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, now with 38 total weeks at the top
• \”Billie Jean\” has climbed to No. 17 on the Hot 100, 43 years after its original release
• The Essential Michael Jackson hit No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart for the first time since 2009, when it surged following Jackson’s death
• The chart boom arrives alongside renewed legal scrutiny, as the Cascio family’s sexual abuse lawsuit draws fresh attention

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Three weeks into its theatrical run, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael is doing something no marketing campaign could manufacture: it’s making a dead man’s decades-old music feel brand new again. Not just on one chart, not just in one country — everywhere, all at once, in numbers that are genuinely hard to wrap your head around.

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For the tracking week of May 1–7, Jackson’s solo catalog registered 181.6 million official on-demand song streams in the United States alone, according to data platform Luminate. That’s a 32% jump from the prior week’s 137.6 million — which was itself a 146% improvement over his then-record of 55.9 million weekly streams. He’s broken his own personal best three weeks in a row. Early data for the following week already showed 86 million streams logged in just three days (May 8–10), putting a 200-million-stream week within reach.

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\”Billie Jean\” is leading the charge. Originally released on January 2, 1983 as the second single from Thriller, it held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks and made Jackson the first artist ever to simultaneously top all four of Billboard’s major pop and R&B charts. Now, 43 years later, it’s back — rocketing from No. 38 to No. 17 on the Hot 100, topping newer releases from Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber in the process. The song has also climbed to No. 2 on Spotify’s global chart and currently sits at 2.7 billion total streams on the platform. It is, by every measure, still his biggest song — and it’s proving it all over again.

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\”Beat It,\” \”Human Nature,\” and \”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough\” have all returned to the Hot 100 as well, with \”Beat It\” and \”Human Nature\” finishing second and third behind \”Billie Jean\” in Jackson’s catalog for the week with 11.4 million and 10.8 million plays respectively.

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Thriller Is Making History — Again

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The album that started it all is back on top. Thriller has reclaimed No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, earning 62,000 equivalent album units in the May 1–7 tracking week — a 36% jump from the week before, driven by 50.3 million streams. That brings Thriller’s total weeks at No. 1 on that chart to 38, extending its own record for the most weeks at the top by a male artist. (SZA’s SOS holds the overall record with 46 weeks, having surpassed Thriller’s original 37-week run in June 2025.)

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On the Billboard 200, the numbers are just as striking. Thriller has climbed into the top five. The greatest-hits collection Number Ones has entered the top 10 for the first time ever. The Essential Michael Jackson jumped from No. 158 to No. 88. Off the Wall and Dangerous have both reentered the chart. And on the Top Album Sales chart, Thriller jumped from No. 48 to No. 7 — while also crossing 500 total weeks on that chart, a milestone reached by only three other albums in history: Bob Marley’s Legend, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Chronicle, and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

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This is all happening in the biopic’s third week of release. That’s not a opening-weekend spike. That’s a sustained cultural moment.

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The U.K. Is Feeling It Too

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Across the Atlantic, the effect is equally pronounced. The Essential Michael Jackson has returned to No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart — the first time it’s held that position since 2009, when it spent seven weeks there in the immediate aftermath of Jackson’s death. Thriller has jumped to No. 6 and Bad has climbed back into the top 10 for the first time in 14 years. Jackson has also debuted on the U.K. Official Dance Singles Chart for what Forbes reports is his most active year yet on that tally — not a chart where his music has historically been classified, but apparently one where it belongs.

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Even Janet Is Getting a Boost

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Here’s a detail that says everything about the reach of this moment: Janet Jackson, who doesn’t appear in the biopic and isn’t even mentioned in it, is seeing her own streaming numbers rise. According to sister La Toya, Janet “kindly declined” to be depicted in Michael. But for the week ending May 7, her catalog still amassed over 9.4 million official on-demand U.S. streams — her best weekly total of 2026, up 31% from two weeks earlier. A healthy portion of that comes from \”Scream,\” the duet she recorded with her brother, which pulled in nearly 1.2 million plays on its own. Even stripping that song out, her catalog is still up 20% from the prior period.

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Which raises a question that feels increasingly inevitable: could a Janet biopic be next?

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The Shadow the Biopic Doesn’t Acknowledge

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The chart triumph arrives alongside a legal story that the film itself pointedly ignores. Michael has been widely criticized for sidestepping the abuse allegations that have followed Jackson’s legacy for decades, and a new lawsuit is making that omission harder to overlook.

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In February, four siblings from the Cascio family — who were described as something of a second family to Jackson — filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse spanning more than a decade. The complaint alleges that \”Michael Jackson was a serial child predator who, over the course of more than a decade, drugged, raped, and sexually assaulted each of the Plaintiffs, beginning when some of them were as young as seven or eight.\” The family says Jackson groomed them and manipulated them into silence, and that their years of publicly defending him were a product of that grooming.

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Jackson’s estate has pushed back hard. Attorney Martin Singer called the lawsuit \”a desperate money grab\” and noted that the Cascio family \”staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence.\” Singer added: \”These shakedown attempts come more than 15 years after Michael’s death, thus carrying no risk of being sued for defamation. Sadly, in death just as in life, Michael’s talents and success continue to make him a target.\” The estate previously reached a settlement with the family in 2019.

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It’s the tension that sits underneath all of this — a catalog shattering streaming records, a biopic crossing half a billion dollars at the global box office, and a legacy that remains as contested as it is celebrated.

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For now, the numbers keep climbing. And if the early streaming data for week four holds, Michael Jackson may be about to break his own record again.

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“category”: “Music

The post Michael Jackson’s Music Is Taking Over the Charts Again appeared first on Cream.

• The Michael Jackson biopic Michael is projected to cross $500 million worldwide by Sunday
• The film has already earned $441.2 million globally through Wednesday of its third week
• Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew, stars in the title role under director Antoine Fuqua
• Jackson’s music is surging in parallel — he’s on track to move roughly 125,000 units this week across streaming and sales
• New competition arrives this weekend from Mortal Kombat II, though projections still favor Michael clearing the milestone

Three weeks in, and Michael is still making history. The Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic about Michael Jackson is on pace to cross the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office this weekend — a milestone that looked inevitable the moment it posted a staggering $217 million global debut on opening weekend (April 24–26), then followed that up with another $135 million in its second frame.

Through Wednesday, the film has earned $195.2 million domestically and $246 million internationally, bringing its worldwide total to $441.2 million. Deadline projects a third-weekend haul of around $30 million in North America and $50 million internationally — good for roughly $80 million globally. Factor in Thursday night ticket sales, and the film could land anywhere from a conservative $520 million to as high as $525–$530 million by Sunday night. Even if the domestic number comes in at the lower end of Box Office Pro’s $25–$30 million range, it’s still more than enough to clear the half-billion threshold.

The film stars Jaafar Jackson — son of Jermaine Jackson and the late King of Pop’s own nephew — in what has become one of the more talked-about casting choices in recent memory. The biopic traces Michael Jackson’s life from age 10, when he was performing alongside his brothers in The Jackson Five, through the Bad album tour in 1988. Critics have had their reservations, but audiences clearly haven’t.

The Music Is Having Its Own Moment

The box office run isn’t happening in a vacuum. Michael Jackson is currently dominating both the iTunes singles and album charts, with roughly a dozen entries across each. He’s on track to sell around 125,000 units this week when you factor in streaming — at least 45,000 of those coming from his Number Ones greatest hits compilation alone. The movie, whatever its controversies, is functioning as a full-scale cultural revival of Jackson’s catalog.

It’s also proving to be a serious financial win for the Jackson Estate and his children. Whether it leads anywhere else — a sequel, a longer career for Jaafar — is a genuinely open question. Showbiz411 noted pointedly that a part two seems unlikely, since it would risk unraveling everything the first film has built. As for Jaafar himself, the question of what comes next for him as an actor is one Hollywood will be watching closely.

What’s Fighting for the Weekend Crown

Michael does face some real competition this weekend. Mortal Kombat II — the sequel to the 2021 video game adaptation — opens Friday, and Deadline projects it could pull as much as $50 million domestically, with Box Office Pro putting the range at $40–$45 million. Meanwhile, The Devil Wears Prada 2, which knocked Michael off the domestic top spot last weekend, is heading into its second frame. Deadline has it finishing in the low $40 millions stateside, but globally it’s expected to remain a force — projections put its international take at $65–$75 million, which would give the Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway sequel a second-weekend worldwide total somewhere between $107 million and $117 million.

Two more newcomers round out the weekend: Hugh Jackman’s family comedy The Sheep Detectives, projected to earn $12 million-plus domestically, and Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard & Soft the Tour Live in 3D — co-directed by Eilish and James Cameron — which Deadline pegs at $6–$9 million in its opening frame.

But this weekend belongs to Michael. Half a billion dollars. For a biopic. About a man who’s been gone since 2009 — and whose music is currently all over the charts like he never left.

The post Michael Jackson Biopic Hits $500M at Box Office appeared first on Cream.