In 2012 I met John Branca, Michael Jackson’s lawyer of 40-odd years and the brains behind Jackson’s estate, which is worth an estimated $2.4 billion. Branca, who is worth about $100 million himself, began working for Jackson in 1980 and five years later helped him seal his famous purchase of the rights to the Beatles’ songs. When we met he had just collaborated with the director Spike Lee on a documentary about Jackson’s Bad album. Proclaiming Jackson as a better dancer than Fred Astaire, Branca combined suavity, bravado and steel in the way that only high-powered Americans can.
Now 74, Branca is a prime mover behind a forthcoming film about Jackson’s life that he has said would become “the largest-grossing, most acclaimed biopic in the history of Hollywood”. There’s a snag, though.
The release of the movie has reportedly been derailed because it depicted Jordan Chandler, who in 1993, aged 13, was the first person to accuse Jackson of sexual abuse. When Chandler and his family confirmed a reported $20 million settlement and non-disclosure agreement with Jackson in 1994, the singer’s lawyers are thought to have agreed not to discuss the details of the deal or depict the Chandlers in any future film. The biopic, which is thought to have featured a showdown between the Chandlers and Jackson’s legal team, is apparently due to begin reshoots in March, with its release date having already been pushed back from April this year to October.
If such a basic error has been made, it’s at odds with the gimlet-eyed efficiency with which Jackson’s legacy has been milked by Branca and others. In 2016 the singer’s estate earned $825 million, thought to be the largest figure recorded by a celebrity estate, and last year made an estimated $600 million via streams including music, royalties, theatrical shows and merchandise. That put Jackson back at the top of Forbes magazine’s macabre “highest paid dead celebrities” chart (Freddie Mercury is at No 2, Dr. Seuss third).
The profits have rolled in. In 2009 Michael Jackson’s This Is It turned rehearsal footage from his uncompleted tour of the same name into a documentary that made $261 million at the box office; and MJ the Musical, which opened on Broadway in 2022 and the West End in 2024, has won four Tonys and grossed more than $230 million, making it one of the most lucrative stage musicals in history. Last year Sony bought half of Jackson’s back catalog for about $600 million. Now comes the movie, tentatively titled Michael and directed by Antoine Fuqua, who made the Oscar-winning Training Day, with Jackson played by Jaafar Jackson, the singer’s nephew, who is the son of his brother Jermaine.
So the estate is doing very nicely, thank you. The prime beneficiaries are Jackson’s sons Prince, 27, and Bigi, 22, and daughter Paris, 26, who last year revealed she was a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. They have yet to receive their inheritance due to a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service.
Michael Jackson is at the top of Forbes magazine’s macabre “highest paid dead celebrities” list.
In the meantime, the executors of this money-printing behemoth are Branca, Jackson’s lawyer, and the accountant John McClain, with Branca’s centrality to the story emphasized by the fact that he is being played in the biopic by a bona fide Hollywood star, Miles Teller (Whiplash, Top Gun: Maverick). Branca has also brokered big deals for the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Dr. Dre, the Eagles and Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records.
Branca was fired by Jackson in 2003 after a private investigation into an alleged flow of funds from Jackson via Branca and the Sony Music chief executive officer Tommy Mottola into offshore accounts in the Caribbean. There turned out to be little solid evidence for the allegations, which some think were part of a smear campaign to persuade Jackson to get rid of Branca. The singer rehired him on June 17, 2009, just eight days before he died.
Chandler, meanwhile, has vanished from public life.
Various reports suggested he had moved to New York, studied finance, invested some of the settlement and changed his name. His mother, June, has also kept a low profile, and his father, Evan, underwent several plastic surgery procedures to disguise himself from vengeful Jackson fans and killed himself in November 2009, five months after Jackson’s death.
Jackson fired John Branca in 2003. He was rehired just eight days before the singer’s death in 2009.
So was the singer bad, dangerous or just off the wall? One of the most convincing cases for his guilt came in Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary in which Wade Robson and James Safechuck alleged with disturbing detail and apparent sincerity that Jackson had sexually abused them as children. Robson and Safechuck are involved in legal proceedings against Jackson’s estate. In 2022 Branca told The Daily Telegraph that the documentary was “provably false as it is an infomercial for a failed lawsuit”.
Jackson has largely escaped cancellation, and many fans are violently convinced of his innocence; the biopic is thought to portray him as the victim of the Chandlers. Opinions vary wildly. In 2019 I asked Barbra Streisand, who had been friendly with Jackson in the Eighties, about Leaving Neverland. Streisand said she believed Robson and Safechuck, but that Jackson’s “sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has. You can say ‘molested’, but those children, as you heard say [the grown-up Robson and Safechuck], they were thrilled to be there … I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him.” A few days later Streisand issued a public apology, saying, “I didn’t mean to dismiss the trauma these boys experienced.”
Jackson is probably too big to fail, his songs too good to stop playing. We may also have been dazzled by all these shiny posthumous products. Or does he simply belong to a pre-cancellation generation? Jessa Crispin, the editor of the blog The Culture We Deserve, has made the interesting claim that “anyone who built up a loyal following before the advent of social media is ultimately immune from it”. That’s not the case for Gary Glitter, but it may be for Jackson and David Bowie, who is widely accepted to have slept with underage girls.
Either way, it makes for nuanced drama. John Logan, the playwright and screenwriter who wrote the script for the Jackson biopic, told The Times last year about the project: “The quote I have hanging over my computer is ‘Nothing that is human is alien to me’. That’s what dramatists do. You have to have empathy for the most monstrous characters, as you do for the most exalted.”
Colman Domingo, who plays Jackson’s father, Joe, in the biopic, said last year that it charts “three decades of Michael’s life and we get to the early Noughts” and that the Jackson family are “on board with us making the most complex film possible”.
It just got a whole lot more complex.
Ed Potton writes about film, music, and the arts. He also co-presents a weekly film show for The Times of London
