82 Percent: What White Critics Could Not See in ‘Michael’

By Rob Redding

Editor & Publisher

NEW YORK, April 26, 2026, 7 p.m.— Eighty-two percent of film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are written by white critics. Nearly sixty-four percent are written by white men. That is not my number. That is USC Annenberg's Inclusion Initiative, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, the most comprehensive study of film critic demographics ever conducted. Among Rotten Tomatoes "top critics," the number climbs to eighty-nine percent white. The ratio of white male top critics to women of color is twenty-seven to one.

Now read every review of "Michael."

Forty percent from critics. Ninety-six percent from audiences. The largest gap in Rotten Tomatoes biopic history. And somehow nobody is asking the obvious question. Not what is wrong with the movie. What is wrong with the room.

The critical consensus is that "Michael" is a sanitized musical spectacle. A greatest hits reel. A hagiography. A film "terrified to explore the interiority of its protagonist." The word "sanitized" appears in review after review. Critics wanted one thing from this movie, which is the molestation charges. They wanted to see Antoine Fuqua reckon with Jordan Chandler. They wanted the allegations on screen. They are furious that they did not get them.

Here is what they did not bother to find out or ignore knowing. The original script, written by John Logan, had the Chandler case as the backbone of the third act. It opened and closed the film. It portrayed Michael as the victim of what the script characterized as a money-driven family. It included a recording of Evan Chandler, Jordan's father, allegedly saying he would use his son's claims to destroy Michael's career. Miles Teller as John Branca and Derek Luke as Johnnie Cochran were filmed debating whether to settle. Principal photography wrapped in May 2024 with all of that footage in the can.

Then the Jackson lawyers caught it. The 1994 Chandler settlement, reported between twenty and twenty-five million dollars, contained a clause that barred any depiction or mention of Jordan Chandler in any motion picture. The Jackson estate's own attorneys did not discover this until after a Financial Times report in September 2024 revealed that the estate had paid five additional accusers to remain silent after HBO's "Leaving Neverland." Twenty-two days of reshoots followed. The cost has been reported between ten million and fifty million dollars. The estate paid because it was their legal oversight.

The filmmakers did not choose to leave the allegations out. They were legally prohibited from including them. The critics who built their entire reviews around the absence of something that could not legally be present did not do the reporting. They did the performance.

But that is not the column. The column is about what they missed while they were performing.

"Michael" is a Black film. Not a film that happens to feature Black people. A film about Blackness as a condition, a crisis, a negotiation, and a survival. And eighty-two percent of the people reviewing it do not have the frame to see that.

Start in Gary, Indiana. A Black working-class steel town. The Jacksons' route out is talent, not assimilation. The film shoots this on actual film stock to give the sixties sequences the grain and texture of lived memory. No critic treated Gary as a racial narrative. They treated it as a biopic setup. It is not a setup. It is the origin. Everything that follows in Michael Jackson's life, every transformation, every ripple, every negotiation with whiteness, begins in the specific Blackness of Gary, Indiana.

Then there is Joe.

Colman Domingo has said publicly that he and Fuqua talked about "men of a certain generation, raised pre-civil rights" whose hardness was survival architecture, not pathology. The critics saw the belt. They wrote "cartoonishly cruel." They did not see what the belt was protecting against. Joe Jackson beat his children because the world outside their door would do worse, and he knew it because that world had already done it to him. That is not an excuse. It is a context that pre-civil rights Black fatherhood carries in its bones, and you cannot understand this film without it. The critics could not understand it because they do not carry it.

And then the nose.

This is the scene the critics dismissed or missed entirely. Joe mocks young Michael's nose. The ridicule happens in the wake of violence. Years later, after Michael has had cosmetic surgery, Joe confronts him. Michael tells his father he had to do it because of his sinuses. Everyone in the theater who is Black heard what that scene was actually about. Michael did not get rhinoplasty because of his sinuses. He got it because his father told him his nose was wrong. And his father told him his nose was wrong because America told Joe Jackson that broad Black features were wrong. And America told Joe Jackson that because America has been telling Black people that since before the first ship landed. Michael's sinus excuse is not a lie. It is a survival language. It is the same language Black people have used for generations to avoid naming the wound directly. The critics heard "sinus" and wrote "sanitized." The audience heard "sinus" and understood exactly what he could not say to his father's face.

The vitiligo arc does the same work. The film traces Michael's skin change as medical, not cosmetic. Jaafar Jackson has said the biggest misconception about his uncle is that he "wanted to be white." The autopsy in 2009 confirmed vitiligo. The film builds an entire visual arc around this. A Black man losing the physical marker of his Blackness is a racial identity crisis, not a cosmetic choice. No major critic treated it that way. They could not. They do not live in skin that carries that freight.

The Motown-to-independence arc is an economic narrative as much as a family drama. Michael's break from Motown and from Joe is also a break from Black institutional control into individual Black ownership. Berry Gordy built Motown as a Black institution. Michael left it to own his own masters. That is a story about Black economic sovereignty, about the tension between collective uplift and individual power. The critics saw a career montage. The audience, which was majority Black at 38 percent, saw a man building something that belonged to him for the first time.

And the ninety-six percent audience score is not fan delusion. It is a Black cultural event. Black folks stopped listening to white critics about Black culture a long time ago. This is the Black community reclaiming a figure that the media apparatus spent thirty years defining for them. The audience is not ignoring the controversies. The audience is refusing to let the controversies be the only story. The critics missed that because they do not have the vocabulary for Black cultural reclamation. They have the vocabulary for scandal.

Armond White at National Review was the only critic who touched any of this. He called Jackson "a mass folk hero" and the film "a political project" to restore a narrative the media dismantled. Even White did not go far enough. This is not a political project. It is a racial one. And the reason eighty-two percent of the critical establishment could not see it is the same reason the audience score exists: the people reviewing this film and the people watching it are living in different Americas.

The film ends in 1988 because it has to, both legally and narratively. But what it does in the space it has is tell a story about Blackness that the critical apparatus was not equipped to receive. Not because the critics are bad at their jobs but because their jobs have never required them to see what this film is showing.

Eighty-two percent is not a statistic. It is an explanation.