• Status: Watch List
• Feature: Five Essential Films to Watch Before ‘MICHAEL’ (2026)
• Release Date: April 24, 2026

Antoine Fuqua’s biopic opens this month. These five films will do more for your understanding of Michael Jackson than most of the discourse ever has. Three you’ve probably seen. One you definitely have. One you almost certainly haven’t.

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1. The Elephant Man (1980, dir. David Lynch)

Lynch’s film gives you the gaze. Not just cruelty, but the economy built around it. Who profits, who watches, who gets to walk away feeling clean.

WACKO JACKO functioned as a product category. The oxygen chamber. The surgical photographs. The chimp on the leash. None of it was random. Tabloids do not build grotesques by accident. They build them because grotesques sell.

What The Elephant Man understands, beyond exploitation, is deprivation. Merrick has been denied ordinary human experience so completely that even his longing for it feels dangerous. Jackson knew that ache. In his 2001 Oxford speech, he described himself as the product of a lost childhood, captivated by ordinary life that other people barely noticed. Public pity can still be a form of possession. Respectability can still be a way of arranging the exhibit more tastefully.

2. Edward Scissorhands (1990, dir. Tim Burton)

Everyone reaches for this one first. The suburb wanted the ice sculptures. It didn’t sign up for the hands that made them.

This is a film about the cost of proximity. To know someone marked as other is to risk becoming other by association. That was true of Jackson. The blast radius was real, and the world made sure it stayed that way.

What the film understands, though, is that fascination quickly becomes use. Edward is welcomed as a novelty, absorbed as a utility, and exploited almost as soon as he becomes useful. The suburb likes what he can do for it long before it has any serious capacity for the person himself. That, too, was true of Jackson.

Burton also understands how quickly desire turns when it is refused. One of the suburb’s housewives decides Edward is hers the moment he arrives. She doesn’t want him. She wants what he represents: difference at a safe distance. The moment he won’t play the part, attraction curdles into accusation. His difference was the draw. Now it becomes the evidence. Once white audiences were screaming for him at that scale, the press went to work on the otherness. He’s weird. He sleeps in a chamber. He wants to buy the bones of the Elephant Man. The housewife is personal humiliation. What happened to Jackson was the same thing.

The film also understands that menace often arrives looking entirely normal. Handsome, local, and fluent in the language of the ordinary suburbs.

3. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971, dir. Mel Stuart)

When the world locks the door, some people stop knocking and build a world of their own. Neverland belongs in that lineage.

But Wonka isn’t hiding. He rebuilt the childhood bargain the world failed to honour. Wilder played him as unplaceable, governed by internal laws the audience could never quite map. Jackson understood that instinct intimately, enough to pursue the role himself. Neverland was less an escape than a correction.

What matters in Wonka is the coexistence of warmth and unease. The film never treats that contradiction as a flaw to be solved. It simply accepts that wonder can have teeth, and that solitude can look like sovereignty until you notice the cost.

He built an entire world and is still alone at the centre of it. The film knows solitude can look like mastery from the outside. It also takes childhood seriously, as a different way of meeting reality rather than a stage to be outgrown.

4. Harvey (1950, dir. Henry Koster)

Nobody suggests this one. They should.

Elwood P. Dowd is a wealthy eccentric who insists on the reality of a companion no one else can see. Everyone around him has a diagnosis ready. The civilised world has procedures for people whose inner life refuses to behave.

The other films on this list mostly let you observe the outsider from a safe distance. Harvey quietly erodes that distance. It adjusts your sympathies so subtly that, before long, normal starts to look less like health than surrender.

Think about what Jackson said in his own words. That he would point to a beautiful sky and someone would say yeah, it’s nice. That he once broke down in front of a painting in a Paris museum and had to be carried out. That, faced with the gap between his register and everyone else’s, his instinct was to assume the deficiency was his. He had begun to see his own vision through the eyes of the cured. And still he kept pointing at the sky. That is what Harvey understands. Elwood never took the formula. The film treats that as victory, not pathology.

Harvey gives you the grammar. Moonwalker shows you Jackson wrote in it fluently.

5. Moonwalker (1988, dir. Jerry Kramer and Colin Chilvers)

Jackson produced it, starred in it, and left his fingerprints all over it. This is the one closest to self-portraiture.

Moonwalker stages Jackson’s relationship with the world through fantasy, pursuit, grotesquerie and protection. Fame as purpose. Fame as pursuit. The press as predator. And at the centre of its longest and most fevered sequence, buried inside all the spectacle and transformation, something disarmingly simple: a man protecting children from harm. That’s the engine. Everything else exists in service of that one instinct. Jackson put that at the heart of the only feature-length film built around his own screen persona, years before anyone tried to rewrite what his closeness to children meant.

The detail that links this film to everything else on the list is stranger and quieter than the caricature ever allowed for. Jackson put it there himself. Watch this last.

Featured Photo: Lionsgate

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Author Bio

As a freelance journalist, Ryan Smith’s work is driven by a commitment to restoring what has long been absent from institutions meant to uphold truth and accountability: honesty and transparency. Alongside his analysis works on the life, career, trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, whose unfair treatment over the years paved the way for the path he is on, Smith also dissects and examines popular culture, such as books, movies and video games, always aiming to shed light on what’s beneath the surface.