Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, Michael—a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was—intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The film’s release has sparked a civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability. Musically, Jackson was in a class all his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists charted on Billboard and he became a recurring meme online, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 number one singles, countless awards, twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy was also defined by multiple allegations of sexual abuse, an occasionally eccentric personal life, and Jackson’s on-record admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. “This guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,” Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 Emmy-winning HBO documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct, recently told the Hollywood Reporter. Director Antoine Fuqua, who maintains Jackson’s innocence, never intended to fully avoid the allegations that circled Jackson later in life. According to him, the original cut of Michael included a reenactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, where Jackson was strip-searched to verify the physical description of his first accuser, Jordan Chandler. But the scene was ultimately scrapped along with the film’s entire third act—totaling $15 million in reshoots—because of a legal clause in a settlement with Chandler that prohibited the depiction of his experience on screen. The result is a film that stops abruptly in 1988 and erases t