Jaafar Jackson FIRES BACK At Critics Bashing The Michael Jackson Biopic! – dw
Jafar Jackson just said the one thing fans have been waiting years to hear. He did not dance around the abuse allegations against his uncle. He called them someone else’s story pushed by someone else’s agenda. Within hours, the internet split straight down the middle over that one sentence. Bar Jackson, we know Michael Jackson’s nephew nephew who played him in the Michael movie, did an interview with uh GQ Middle East.
Now they ask him about the fact that the sexual assault allegations were not included in the first film and you know what are his feelings around that critique. He says uh that he thinks the second film will give more insight from Michael Jackson’s point of view on those allegations because at the end of the day the allegations are always from someone else’s.
Uh he’s talking about point of view and he does make it clear that like he doesn’t have any like deciding factor or say so. He doesn’t really know everything that will be in this biopic. Joffar said that it’s someone else’s story. It’s someone else’s idea of what it is and it’s mainly driven by an agenda.
And that’s really the issue we’ve been having as a family, not having Michael’s voice being heard. I think that’s very, very important, especially in the late years. He also added that this first film focuses on Michael from his roots. So, you get that idea of who he was before he had all the success and became the icon that people are familiar with.
you understand who he was as a human being first because at the end of the day that’s who he was in the ‘9s until he passed. He never changed that purity, that sense of always wanting to find the good in other people. And no matter all the stuff he went through, how he was treated, what things were said about him, he never stopped treating people with kindness.
He never stopped believing in and wanting to look for the good in people. Even though he was broken, his heart still stayed the same. I hope that this is felt in the second movie. That is not a man hiding from anything. That is someone staying soft in a world that kept trying to harden him. That is the Michael this family wants the sequel to show.
Broken by the outside world, but kind to the very end. Okay, you saw the soft reply from Joffar, but Taj Jackson’s reaction was completely different. Michael’s nephew and the family’s longest running online defender. When backlash over the first film hit its peak earlier this year, he broke his silence, too. He posted directly at the media covering the movie with no softened words.
He wrote that the media does not get to control who Michael Jackson truly was anymore, that the public will watch and decide for themselves and that critics cannot handle it. He also tweeted, “Can’t wait till some critics have to eat Crow and yes, I will be that petty.” bold words and honestly someone in this family was due to say them.
Taj has watched outlets build entire careers off recycling the same allegations for 30 years straight. He finally said out loud what a lot of fans have been thinking the whole time. The public bought a billion dollars in tickets and they can clearly make up their own minds. Put Jaffer’s interview next to Taja’s tweet and you see a family finally moving as one unit.
No more staying quiet and letting other people write the ending for them. Jafar is fighting for it on screen. Taj is fighting for it online. And both are aiming at the same target. That kind of unity is rare for a family that has been picked apart in public for decades. Not everyone is going to love that a family is finally pushing back this hard.
Critics will call it defensive, call it one-sided, call it whatever keeps the headlines coming. But the accusers telling their stories does not automatically make every other voice in the room an agenda pusher. Joffar and Taj are simply refusing to let that be the only version anyone hears. Other Jackson family members handled the pressure differently.
Paris spoke openly about what she felt the film got right or wrong. A big reason why I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are going to be happy with it. Like a big section. the film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy and they’re going to be happy with it.
Just like like I remember hearing about how Freddy Mercury’s family responded to seeing the Bohemian Rapsy film, right? And I remember like reading the dirt autobiography as a kid and then growing up and like watching the movie they ended up making starring like MGK and I was like Prince weighed in more cautiously on social media.
You know the critics were betting against this movie and here we are first weekend out it already broke records and you know my father was is and always will be a man of the people and the people are speaking. At its core this was never just a debate about one performance. It became a debate about who gets to tell Michael Jackson’s story and how.
When the movie actually came out, a brand new wave of backlash started, this time aimed at the film itself. One critic compared the film to watching Keys jangle in front of your face for 2 hours straight. That same critic reportedly scored a video game adaptation higher than Michael, a detail that frustrated fans who disagreed with the take.
Still, plenty of critics said Michael avoided anything difficult about Michael Jackson’s actual life. They called the story smoothed over and safe. The movie itself for me, I I don’t know, man. Like I said, it it’s it’s a ball of emotion for me just kind of seeing some of the subliminals and some of the backstories behind it.
Now, I will agree with you. It was a lot of like safe parts in that movie. It was safe as hell. So many safe. There was zero depth to that movie. Zero. They didn’t go into it. It was all surface level Jackson. That’s it. I felt like a cleaned up. They tried to clean up um the vitiligago. One reviewer who genuinely liked the film admitted it plays out as a very crafted squeaky clean version of the singer.
He pointed out the movie shows Michael surrounded by animals in childlike wonder, but never shows him raise his voice or lose his temper. That reviewer also noted Michael was famously hard to read in real life since courts had cleared him of allegations while tabloids kept pushing their own version of events. He suspected some critics went in already, expecting the film to paint Michael as simply misunderstood and reacted to that assumption before judging it fairly.
This is what you should know before watching the Michael Jackson biopic. Critics are calling it extraordinarily sanitized. The performances are getting praised. The songs are recreated almost perfectly, but everything that makes Michael complicated, they cut. And there’s a reason that they cut it. Antoine Fukqua was making a full career biopic.
It was $155 million. Everyone had said that Jafar Jackson’s performance as his uncle was uncanny. But mid-p production, the estate’s lawyers caught something in an old contract. The contract in the 1993 settlement with the Chandler family, the family of Michael’s first accuser, has a clause in it that prohibits the portrayal of their family in any Michael Jackson film ever.
The scenes covering the 1993 allegations were two of Michael’s sisters, Janet and Rebby, are missing from the film entirely. Reports say they didn’t sign off on their likeness being used. Critics argue that the absence makes the story feel incomplete, like a major piece of the family picture was left out on purpose. Janet Jackson is noticeably absent from the new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, and the movie makes it like she doesn’t even exist and not all the siblings are a part of the film.
And I looked into this cuz I thought it was very strange and to be honest with you, a little bit distracting for me while I watched the movie. I did not know that Janet said no to her likeness being used in this film. When I went to see it, I just kept being like, when is Janet going to show up? The relationship with Michael’s father, Joseph Jackson, is in the film, but many say it barely scratches the surface of what actually happened.
It’s not going to tell the real story. It’s not going to actually show the torture that this man went through from his own father and how his father was the godfather of bad celebrity parents. Michael Jackson movie, which we’re about to get, stars Michael Jackson’s own nephew, Jafar Jackson, playing him in the biopic, and the family is very involved throughout the entire writing process where everyone has been involved in consulting, including Michael Jackson’s piece of dad.
The movie compresses more than 30 years of history into two hours, ending before Michael’s most controversial decades even begin. One critic pointed to the Pepsi commercial accident where Michael was burned filming an ad, saying it gets barely 10 minutes of screen time. That same critic argued the movie would have worked much better as a series, giving each chapter of Michael’s life room to breathe.
He specifically praised the young actor playing Michael and the Jackson 5 years, saying those scenes alone could have filled an entire film. The film recreates several of Michael’s most iconic music videos and live performances along with a brief cameo mirrored from another recent music biopic.
Some reviewers said that approach felt redundant, arguing fans could just watch the real performances on YouTube instead of a recreation. Some also criticized the ending itself, pointing out the story stops at a concert without covering the decades of controversy that followed. The end, like we spent the whole movie about him wanting to um leave the Jackson to do his own thing and then it cuts to bad era and then the movie ends and I literally was like, is this it? Like what? I’m They argued the title should have made clear this was only part one of
Michael’s story, not the whole picture. That argument didn’t stop the bland and too safe label from spreading. Many viewers online kept repeating that same complaint. That’s the environment Joffar Jackson was standing in when he finally responded, not with anger, but with a short, clear statement.
He said, “It isn’t about the name, it’s about the work. It’s about showing the real journey, not just the famous moments everyone already knows.” It was it was a process that I really had to to earn and it really proved to the filmmakers and myself and and my family that I I can get to that point where I can pull it off.
And uh I remember with that specific performance performing in the exact uh uh auditorium where Michael did it just to get that energy and that that feeling was it was incredible. That single comment shifted the conversation at least for a moment. people started discussing his preparation instead of just the backlash because this role was never a simple imitation for JFR.
Every movement he makes gets compared directly to the real Michael Jackson and I was so self-conscious at that point. I was so I guess doubtful in the sense that I knew I couldn’t get it down in that time frame. I knew I needed more than 20 days. But within that time, I really learned a lot about myself that even though I I wasn’t pulling off a lot of the moves or knowing the meaning behind it, I still tried it again and again over and over until I got it right.
Or even if I didn’t get it right, I was still trying it. He’s letting the film exist, taking the criticism as it comes and standing behind the work regardless of what reviewers say. Critics have laid out exactly what they think the film left out. Jafar has laid out exactly how he feels about the work regardless. Through all of it, what stands out most is what Jafar hasn’t done.
No public feud, no attacks on critics, no defensive spiral online. Instead, his approaches look like grace under pressure, treating both waves of backlash as something to absorb, not something to fight. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the critics say. What matters is the opinion of the audience. So, as the audience, tell me in the comment section, what would you like to say to these so-called critics? Don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe button.
