Lionsgate is targeting late 2026 or early 2027 to start filming Michael 2, with the sequel to the billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic hitting theaters at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028. Adam Fogelson, chairman of the studio’s Motion Picture Group, gave the update Thursday during Lionsgate’s quarterly earnings call, the regular meeting where a public company walks Wall Street analysts through its financials and answers questions about what is coming next. Studios use those calls to tip their hand on future projects, and this one was all about the King of Pop.
“We are targeting a production start towards the end of this year or early next,” Fogelson said, before adding that “the end of calendar ’27 and the first half of calendar ’28 would be the current thought of roughly where the movie would go.” He also made clear the studio is holding some cards, saying they are “not ready to announce everything at the moment.”
Here is the part that should tell you how fast this thing can actually move. Back on the May earnings call, Fogelson said Lionsgate already has 25 to 30 percent of a second movie shot from the first production. On Thursday he circled back to it. “We do have a number of sequences, particularly some big musical sequences, that were shot previously, that are almost sure to be incorporated,” he said. So Michael 2 is not starting from a blank page. Some of the most expensive material in a music biopic, the full scale performance numbers with the choreography, the crowds, the wardrobe, the lighting, is already filmed and waiting.
That existing footage exists because of how messy the first movie got. Michael was originally scheduled for November 2025 and got pushed to April 2026 after a legal problem surfaced deep into production. Attorneys for the Jackson estate discovered that a prior settlement with one of the singer’s accusers included a clause barring his depiction in any film. The sequence had already been shot. According to Deadline, the discovery triggered roughly $50 million in reshoots, which the Jackson estate covered, and the third act of the movie was rebuilt from scratch with a new ending.
The result of all that rewriting is a film that stops in 1987, at the Bad tour, and closes with the words “His Story Continues” on screen. That is a few years before the first public allegations of child sexual abuse against Jackson, claims he denied for the rest of his life and that his estate still denies. The first movie left that entire chapter untouched. Whether Michael 2 goes anywhere near it is the open question nobody at Lionsgate has answered, and given who controls the rights and who wrote the check for those reshoots, it is fair to assume the estate has a strong opinion about it.
What is left on the table besides the controversy is a lot. The Dangerous era. Invincible. The building of Neverland. The HIStory tour. Fogelson said in May that “there is a ton of incredibly entertaining Michael Jackson story, and much of the biggest and most popular parts of his music catalog that were not touched upon in the first film,” and that the studio “can go forwards and backwards in telling this story.” Translation: the sequel does not have to run in a straight line from where the first one ended. They can jump back into the timeline of the original movie and fill in what got cut.
The money explains the urgency. Michael opened April 24 and crossed $1 billion worldwide, making it the first Lionsgate release ever to hit that number and the highest grossing biopic of all time. That is Bohemian Rhapsody money and then some. Antoine Fuqua directed, Graham King produced, John Logan wrote the script, and Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real life nephew, carried the lead role in his first major screen performance. Nia Long and Colman Domingo also star. Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer put it plainly on the May call: “We believe there is a lot more story to tell and a lot more music to share.”
The one number Fogelson would not touch was the budget for Michael 2. “We are mostly focused right now on how to make sure we can deliver, at the right price, the biggest, best sequel,” he said. “That is what the audience is going to want and deserve after the experience we gave them the first time. So we’re not ready to give guidance on the budget yet, but we certainly will be able to take advantage of some stuff that we previously shot.”
Reading between the lines, the pre shot footage is being framed as a cost advantage, which matters because the first film was famously expensive before the reshoots ever happened. Lionsgate wants investors to hear that the sequel comes with a head start baked in.
Casting and story details have not been announced, and the studio has not formally confirmed which cast members return, though Jaafar Jackson coming back is the obvious expectation given the ending of the first film and the footage already shot. He has been busy elsewhere too, recently landing a role in a Will Smith action thriller at Amazon MGM.
For now, the calendar is the news. Cameras up within roughly six months. Theaters within two years. And a studio sitting on a quarter of a movie it already paid for.
