Please stop making music biopics. We need a break from this tired genre that is essentially expensive karaoke | Rebecca Shaw

"It is a film that has seen huge success at the box office, while receiving mixed (mostly negative) reviews. It has been skewered as a shallow film, more like a well-performed playlist of Michael Jackson songs than a deep dive into his complicated story. The movie also ends in 1988, a seemingly deliberate choice to avoid having to reckon with the darker aspects of his life that followed."

"we need a moratorium on musical biopics. This is not a new thought from me. In fact if there were a biopic of my life, part of it would be me complaining about musical biopics; complaints that grew in strength after witnessing Bohemian Rhapsody, a movie I believe to be a gay hate crime."

"Biopic film-makers are often trapped between competing obligations. Whether dealing with a living subject or a dead one, the artist's reputation and wishes come into play, as well as rights clearances, access to catalogues, cooperation from family members and musical co-creators all things that can easily flatten and compromise the telling of someone's story."

"As with a lot of these movies, the conversation tends to revolve around who is playing the character, how much they look like them or not, how much they sound like them or not (anyone remember months of conversation about Austin Butler's Elvis voice?), whether the movie is true to life, and so on."

A new Michael Jackson biopic has achieved strong box office results while receiving mostly negative reviews. Criticism centers on the film feeling shallow, resembling a well-performed sequence of songs rather than a deep examination of a complex life. The story ending in 1988 is seen as a deliberate avoidance of later darker events. The view presented calls for a moratorium on musical biopics, arguing that the genre is difficult to make satisfying. Biopic filmmakers are constrained by obligations to living or deceased subjects, reputation and wishes, rights clearances, access to catalogs, and cooperation from families and musical collaborators. Despite these challenges, many such films continue to be produced, with frequent focus on casting, physical resemblance, vocal resemblance, and claims of factual accuracy.

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