Lionsgate vice chair Adam Fogelson told a Wednesday-evening industry audience that a sequel to Michael "could shoot as early as this year," and Tuesday's box-office actuals confirmed the biopic crossed eleven million dollars on a fourth-week weekday, the fourth-best April Tuesday on the historical board [1][2]. The two announcements landed inside twelve hours.
The paper's Tuesday standard read the picture's hundred-million-dollar domestic milestone as the moment Lionsgate's balance-sheet bet on the Jackson estate co-producer template stopped being theoretical. Fogelson's Wednesday commitment, building on the Apr 28 frame the paper carried at major prominence, converts the event into a multi-picture rights bet — the studio is now treating Michael Jackson as a slate, not a single asset.
The compounding-weekday curve is the financing tell. Pictures that open big and front-load the gross do not earn fourth-best-April-Tuesday status three and a half weeks in. Michael did, which means the demand inside the older end of the ticket-buying audience is real, the legal questions Page Six surfaced last week notwithstanding [3]. Lionsgate's stock closed up 3.4% Wednesday on volume.
Will Leitch's Washington Post column Thursday morning carried the sharpest reading [4]. He called the picture indefensible — flat, hagiographic, structurally allergic to the abuse allegations that have followed Jackson's estate since 1993 — and called the box office equally undeniable. The reader, Leitch wrote, is acting on a different impulse than the critic: the impulse to see how the worst recent decade of an American star is rendered when the people who own his catalog are also the people writing the script.
Avex closed its $100M City National line on the same Tuesday Michael crossed a hundred million domestic. The two events are the same balance-sheet event filed under two different sections of the budget. Both sit inside the paper's entertainment-ip-balance-sheet thread, which the paper promoted to active on Apr 29 after Lionsgate's domestic actuals confirmed the financing model.
The sequel question resting on Fogelson's "this year" line is whether the Jackson estate signs the rights extension before Page Six's reported legal complications around minor witness statements force a shooting-schedule pause. The estate did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Lionsgate's investor day is May 13.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles