Michael Isn't a Biopic, It's an Advertisement | The Backdrop

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:03]Last weekend saw the release of Michael, the new biography of pop star Michael Jackson. And it's well, it's what is most interesting about Michael is that although it is a film looking at the life of one of the most famous human beings to ever live with a frankly fascinating life story to tell, it is incredibly paint by numbers. It is the sort of biographical film that you could throw together after about 10 minutes skimming Jackson's Wikipedia just you know selectively not not that not that it's a fairly generic story about a pop star whose father is abusive and whose arc over the course of the film is largely learning to stand up for himself although that arc is somewhat muddled by the fact that Jackson largely stands up for himself by hiring other people to stand up for him in hisstead. Along the way, there are recreations of iconic images and music videos and a soundtrack of some of the most beloved songs of all time. Watching Michael, I couldn't help but think that the film bears less resemblance to the life of its subject than it does to Bohemian Rap City, the Freddy Mercury biopic from 2018 that grossed almost a billion dollars and was nominated for the best picture Oscar and won best editing and best actor. Michael has the same very basic father issue emotional core and the same focus on recreation of iconic images and beloved music. Both movies are produced by GK Films, that's Graham King's production company. Both films feature extended sequences of Mike Meyers as a record executive and both films end with a sequence of the lead character playing a triumphant set at Wembley Stadium in the mid to late8s.

[00:01:32]Although Bohemi does it better, while the ending of Michael is a damp squib for reasons we'll get to later in the video. Still, this got me thinking about the state of the modern biopic and the genre's transformation over recent years. From celebrations of interesting and complex historical figures to basically origin stories, advertisements for brands and products. You're carrying around a brick playing cassette tape.

[00:01:53]So, I'm going to put a thousand songs in your pocket.

[00:01:56]>> Can do that.

[00:01:57]>> The shift from biopic to biopic.

[00:02:02]So, we're going to talk about that this week. We're going to talk about the history of the biopic and its evolution in recent years. the increasing corporatization of the genre and how the modern explosion in formulaic music biopics is just an extension of that shift. In other words, we're going to take a look at the different ways that we celebrate figures of note.

[00:02:37]The biopic is almost as old as cinema itself, dating back to at least George Malay's Joan of Ark. In fact, the first fulllength narrative feature film is widely considered to be Charles Tate's The Story of the Kelly Gang from 1906.

[00:02:50]The genre has been a fixture of cinema ever since with films often focusing on the lives of notable political leaders or aspirational figures. Abraham Lincoln, for example, has appeared in over 300 films.

[00:03:02]To give a sense of how dominant the genre was, fully half of the best picture winners during the 1980s were biopics. Of the 50 films nominated for the best picture Oscar over that decade, 13 of them were biopics, which is if we crunch the numbers, more than a quarter.

[00:03:18]Now, the genre was certainly imperfect.

[00:03:20]Many of these films were overong and indulgent. They were often dedactic.

[00:03:24]They could feel a little bit like homework. They tended towards uncritical hero worship. Even beyond that, it's difficult to compress down the life of a complicated real life figure to even an extended runtime without reducing them to caricature.

[00:03:38]However, these films did reflect a curiosity about the larger world. And they said something about the kinds of lives that fascinated pop culture, the stories that were deemed worth telling.

[00:03:47]Stories of civil rights leaders, journalists, survivors, and even complicated figures of global significance. The genre obviously evolved and changed over the years. in the 21st century tended towards smaller intimate character studies often built around the narrow point of intersection between two key figures, meetings, interviews, sporting competitions. At the same time, with the twin financial and awards successes of Walk the Line and Ray, the modern musical biopic emerged films about great musicians. And while there had obviously been musical biopics before, these twin awards and commercial successes pushed the subgenre to the forefront. Even from the outset, these movies were extremely formulaic to the point that they were parodyied in Walcard the Dewey Cox story, a spoof that makes jokes that still apply to Michael nearly 20 years later.

[00:04:34]>> You going to have to give him a moment, son.

[00:04:36]>> Michael Jackson.

[00:04:37]>> I used to think about his entire life before he plays.

[00:04:41]>> But in recent years, the traditional biopic has changed a bit. Those old-fashioned biopics still exist with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer winning the best picture Oscar and becoming the highest grossing biopic of all time in 2023.

[00:04:53]And I see Oenheimimer.

[00:04:55]>> While there are fewer of these sorts of biopics, they're notably more cynical about their subjects, often critiquing or rejecting myths of greatness or exceptionalism.

[00:05:04]>> But you're a bunch of boys making models out of balsa wood. You don't have anything under control.

[00:05:09]>> YOU THINK YOU'RE SO GREAT BECAUSE YOU HAVE BOATS.

[00:05:14]It was no more complicated than that.

[00:05:17]>> You don't get to commit the sin and then have us all feel sorry for you that it has consequences.

[00:05:23]>> They are less celebrations of the great man than they are interrogations of the myth of one.

[00:05:28]>> Destiny has brought me here. Destiny has brought me this lamb chop.

[00:05:32]>> And you know, not to be reductive about this, but I do wonder if something may have happened in contemporary American pop culture over the past decade that led to a questioning of the exceptional great man theory of history. But there's no way to know for sure, so we might as well move on. Still, while the traditional biopic has clearly fallen out of favor, something else has emerged to take its place.

[00:05:53]If you've been paying any attention to the genre of historical filmm, you've noticed the increasing prevalence of what might be termed biopics, or biopics, but for products, or unbrand biopics. I guess you could also call them Brando pics, but then you run the risk of getting confused with, well, Brando Pics. It's a real branding nightmare.

[00:06:13]>> I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody.

[00:06:18]>> These biopics are films that have the look and texture of the traditional biographical film. They are stories that are true, or at least purport to be true. Don't worry, we'll come back to that one. Aimed at adults, featuring movie stars, and often built around meetings, conversations, and negotiations.

[00:06:33]However, these conversations are almost always about a product. It's worth noting that the sub genre is so prevalent that it has even spawned its own parody. It's also worth acknowledging that many, if not most of these films, are not about the people who invented the product in question, but the people who monetized and marketed it. This could be seen as part of a larger trend that includes the recent wave of celebrity films, fictional and non-fictional, that stress the importance of the producer or manager to the creative process. I mean, you're J. Kelly, but I'm J. Kelly, too.

[00:07:02]We did this together.

[00:07:03]>> You know, as your manager, I'd be entitled to my cut, too. Of course.

[00:07:10]>> How much is a man's cut?

[00:07:12]>> 25%. By the time of your first pro fight, I will have put in 12 year. By the time of your last 20, 25. In the context of Michael, it's worth noting that the film suggests that only two other human beings in the world are capable of understanding his psychology.

[00:07:31]His loyal bodyguard and his entertainment lawyer, John Brana, played by Miles Teller, who is the only person capable of understanding Jackson's financial ambitions.

[00:07:39]>> You know what I'm after? You want to be the biggest star in the world.

[00:07:42]>> But before we talk about the state of the modern musical celebrity biopic, it is worth talking about these product biopics. Take for example Ben Affleck's Air. It is a movie about Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes of all time. But it's not about Michael Jordan playing basketball. Hell, it's not even about Michael Jordan playing baseball.

[00:07:59]There's more of that in Space Jam, a movie which, and I'm not exaggerating, but we don't have time to get into it, seems to exist in large part to rewrite the narrative of Jordan's father to avoid getting into any uncomfortable questions that might be raised about the man as he actually existed. And look, I'm not going to talk about Michael Jordan's father and Michael Jackson in the same video. Our legal department is overstretched as it is.

[00:08:24]Instead of being about any of that, air is about the small ship deal that Jordan negotiated with Nike around the aonomous shoes. There has been film after film like this, looking at everything from the rise and fall of Blackberry to the origins of Tetris. Hell, Hershey's is getting its own corporate origin story.

[00:08:41]>> We can't fund this chocolate fantasy forever. Even Barbie kind of counts here with Helen Mirror narrating the origin of the product in the opening scene.

[00:08:48]>> Yes, Barbie changed everything.

[00:08:51]>> And Barbie getting to meet her own creator, Ruth Handler.

[00:08:54]>> Thank you, um, Ruth.

[00:08:57]>> To be clear, some of these movies are very good. The best of these, like Air and Blackberry, actually interrogate the systems of late capitalism and what that does to human creativity and identity.

[00:09:07]However, more of them, such as Eva Longoria's Flamin' Hot, completely disregard the true story of a brand's origin to paint a flattering legend of this iconic corporate product. No, no, stop. I mean, you know, I know you're making a movie and it's not going to be exactly exact, but I mean, come on. In some ways, it's Danny Boy and Aaron Sorcin, Steve Jobs that feels like the inflection point here.

[00:09:29]>> You invented lifestyle advertising, and our brand was my brand. And the film is ostensibly a biopic of Steve Jobs played by Michael Fbender. However, the movie is structured around three product launches and its big thesis statement is that Job's entire psychology is effectively reflected in the closed systems of the products that he designed.

[00:09:47]>> You need special tools to open the Mac.

[00:09:49]>> You knew it was a closed system.

[00:09:50]>> The existence by Steve Jobs that it had what's called endto-end control, which is a way of saying that it's not compatible with most outside hardware or software is the Shakespearean flaw in a machine that had potential. It's closed end and I want is a closed system and control completely incompatible with anything.

[00:10:09]>> Computers aren't supposed to have human flaws. I'm not going to build this one with yours.

[00:10:14]>> The film's emotional catharsis coming at a moment of reconciliation between Jobs and his daughter involves the character effectively brainstorming what will become the iPod.

[00:10:22]>> So, I'm going to put a thousand songs in your pocket.

[00:10:25]>> Can do that? And to be clear, in case there's any ambiguity, I love Steve Jobs, just like I love Air, just like I really like Blackberry. While Bole is perhaps too sentimental a director to make a movie quite as good as David Fincher's adaptation of Sorcin's The Social Network, the film is highly underrated within Boille's already impressive filmography. But even accepting that, there is perhaps something disheartening in all this. In the idea that we used to valorize world leaders, civil rights campaigners, and artists, but now we just build creation myths around products. Of course, product placement was always part of the history of Hollywood, and it became particularly pronounced during the 1980s, but this feels like an acceleration of a much larger trend. It isn't just real life products that are being fictionalized and narrativized.

[00:11:08]Pixar recently released Lightyear, which is famously not a movie about the toy from Toy Story, but the movie that the toy in Toy Story is based on.

[00:11:16]>> It's the story that made Andy and his friends want to go buy a Buzz Lightyear toy. You can arguably even see it in KFC teaming with Lifetime to produce Recipe for Seduction, a saucy thriller starring Colonel Sanders. Yes, it's ironic, but it's also indicative of a larger trend in the industry. One reflected in 4-minute commercials that serve as sequels to beloved films, blurring the boundary between movies and adverts.

[00:11:41]>> Wait, hold up. This isn't a movie.

[00:11:45]>> No, it's tourism ad for Australia.

[00:11:47]>> Yes. If commercials are starting to look and act a lot more like films, are films then starting to act and look a lot more like commercials.

[00:11:56]It is in some ways the end point of modern capitalism where it is no longer enough to buy and consume these products, but they must be so fully integrated into our culture as to be mythologized. But hey, at least we're still making biopics about pop stars, right?

[00:12:13]We mentioned a moment ago that the modern musical biopic can trace it through back to walk the line and ray and that is certainly true. However, the phenomenon was supercharged by the success of Bohemian Rapsidity. It's worth pausing to talk just a little bit about Bohemian Rapsidity here.

[00:12:28]Creatively, the film was a disaster. The movie was ostensibly directed by Brian Singer, who was apparently a nightmare to work with and would occasionally just like not show up on set. It didn't help matters that during production, Singer was embroiled in a very public lawsuit concerning sexual assault, with more allegations emerging during the film's awards season and press cycle. By most accounts, the film was really completed by Ghost director Dexter Fletcher, who would go on to direct Rocket Man, the Elton John biopic, and by editor John Oman, to the point that Otman's best editing Oscar win for a movie that is cut together like this.

[00:13:07]So someday I'm going to do a [ __ ] dissertation and show here's how I cut it originally and then here's what happens when too many cooks get in the kitchen and are paranoid about paste >> is largely seen as an acknowledgement by Hollywood for helping land that particular plane. As a critic who was around during that awards season and who cast a ballot or two in the various races, it is very notable that Fox's awards campaign for the film was initially quite subdued. The studio had originally been pushing Steve McQueen's Widows as their big awards contender.

[00:13:36]And when that didn't work out of the festivals, they switched horses mid-stream to Bohemian Rap City. The same thing happened, by the way, to Universal, who had originally been pushing First Man as their awards contender, only to be blindsided by the argument that it did not contain the scientifically dictated correct number of American flags, and so rooted around the bum toy chest until they found Greenbook, a biopic of the man who invented the Kzone. I think it's been a while since I watched that movie. By the way, if you're looking for a good crime film, I can vouch for Widows as an underrated delight.

[00:14:07]>> And I'll require a vouch.

[00:14:09]>> Okay, suit yourself. Anyway, Fox made a big push for Wing Rapsy as a best actor contender with the Fox for your consideration material seeming to imply the film had directed itself. It really does seem like the company was caught a little offguard by Boap's box office and award success. This makes sense.

[00:14:27]Bohemian Rapsity is an astonishingly shallow film with no real perspective or insight into its subject or the creative process. Like it presents the act of songwriting like this.

[00:14:40]>> That's really good.

[00:14:51]Michael is not too different where the boldest creative choice that Michael makes over the course of the film is deciding via pin board that Thriller can be the title of both a track and an album. The best case scenario for this sort of paint by numbers approach to understand the creative process is a sort of dull literalism as demonstrated in say Springsteen Deliver Me from Nowhere. Why isn't there a scene where he like looks at a mansion on a hill and then you cut to him writing the song Mansion on a hill that where he watches Badlands and is like writes Badlands >> stop.

[00:15:19]>> Bohemi does however have two things going for it. The first is the active participation of the surviving members of Queen. Very clearly giving feedback into how they are to be portrayed on camera, stating very clearly for the audience that they would never partake in any of the illegal drug use or extrammarital sex that their deceased colleague Freddy Mercury enjoyed so much.

[00:15:39]>> Fabulous, isn't it? If you say so, we should go. Freddy, sometimes you're a total prick.

[00:15:45]>> This leads into the second thing that it has going for it. Thanks to the buyin from the rights holders, sheer unfiltered nostalgia. loving recreations of iconic music videos and at the climax of the band's epic set at Wembley. Now, I talked a few weeks back about the culture of AI and how it's rooted in a broader culture of nostalgia based in uncanny recreations of existing iconography over and over again. And the climax of Bohemian Rapsidity is very much that, but for 80s rock fans instead of people who care about the color of Wolverine's costume. It is honestly a dazzling piece of spectacle, an incredible sequence to see on a big screen. A loving recreation of a moment in pop culture history that many fans are too young to have experienced firsthand. It's also not a moment that tells the audience anything about who these people are. It's not a celebration of the human beings who made Queen. It's a fact similly of the experience of consuming Queen as a product. And it made nearly a billion dollars and it won a bunch of Oscars. So, here we are now.

[00:16:45]The thing to understand about Bohemian Rapsy and the wave of biopics that emerged in its wake is that they are not just selling the movie itself. The movie is selling the larger brand. It's part of a multi-pronged multifaceted publicity campaign. Hell, you can see this branding and effect in the increasing prevalence of the title format artist colon song or album title or even lyric to maximize the SEO efficiency of these films. And here's the part of the YouTube video that everybody loves, the numbers. But just to rhyme off some important context here, the soundtrack to Bohemia Rapsity was the band's highest charting album on the Billboard 100 in 38 years. It was the bestselling rock title of the first 6 months of 2019, and it served to boy the larger brand with Queen's greatest hits compilation coming in second. In 2022, by the way, their greatest hits became the first album to pass 7 million UK chart sales. And it wasn't just the music that was directly tied to the film either. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Queen were the world's fifth biggest revenue generating recording artist in 2019 and the sixth biggest in 2018. Not bad for a band that last released a new studio album more than two decades prior. The band also kicked off the Rap City tour, which ran for 5 years between 2019 and 2024.

[00:18:06]Then presumably having reaped all the profits they could, they sold the rights to their back catalog for $1.27 billion in June 2024. You can quite literally graph the spike in interest and revenue related to the band tied to the release of Bohemian Rapsy in 2018. So this became a reproducible formula. A musician or their estate negotiates creative control of biographical film because those films need the music rights. I mean, what are you going to do? write an original song for the end of your unlicensed David Bowie biopic.

[00:18:40]Nobody would be that stupid.

[00:18:49]>> If the studios want the back catalog, which is necessary to tap into that nostalgia to make the film successful in the first place, they need to work with the estates. And the estates want some measure of creative control because they know they can leverage a successful biopic into a larger and more profitable revival of the brand. It isn't just Queen. Elton John's sales doubled with the release of Rocket Man, and his final American concert was streamed live on Disney Plus. It goes almost without saying that Michael will be a huge boost to the Jackson estate, which already pulled in $15 million last year through agreements that include the licensing of the back catalog, a stage musical, and two separate Cirus Sole shows. And you can already see the chilling effect in action. With these biopics worth a lot of money and serving as revenue drivers to the larger brand, anything that doesn't paint an easily digestible, triumphant nostalgic narrative is perceived to be a potential threat. Last year, it was announced that the princess state were blocking the release of an already completed expansive Netflix documentary by Ezra Edelman, who was responsible for OJ Made in America, a really wonderful work of documentary that is also notable as the first television show to win an Oscar, but that's a separate video and we're not getting into that right now. Edelman's documentary, which has been screened for critics and which paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a truly fascinating character, was deemed potentially damaging to the brand and so was scrapped as the estate pursues its own Bohemian rapsidity. Edelman himself contextualized this as a broader move by the Prince estate to sanitize the image of the pop star for public consumption, pointing to narrative decisions made in adapting Prince's semi-autobiographical movie Purple Rain as a stage musical to make it more palatable to audiences. And now they're doing this adaptation of Purple Rain for Broadway. And from my understanding, it's like they're changing Prince's character to make it more palatable or to at least tidy up the gender politics. And I think that's literally a phrase I read in the New Yorker piece about the playwright. Who Prince is in that movie, you know, in some ways is revealed, though it was always couch fiction. And in it, Morris Day throws a woman into a dumpster and he slaps that balonier. And now the fact that we've arrived 40 years later and rather than just like, oh, it's the 40th anniversary of Purple Rain, which was last year, and celebrating that, no, we're going to revisit it and revamp it and sanitize it and in turn sanitize Prince's image for current audiences, for younger audiences to make him a less troubling figure. That is [ __ ] up. In some ways, this is just one illustration of the shift in larger culture that has really accelerated the transition from celebrities into brand. The YouTuber Patrick Williams has made a really good video on how movie stars like Ryan Reynolds and The Rock are less human beings than they are sensient brands and you should absolutely check that video out.

[00:21:46]And what we are seeing with these biopics is the retroactive application of this process to existing musical artists. To be clear, there are still good biopics possible within this framework, even if it requires a nearly perfect alignment of creator and subject. Baz Lurman's work with the Elvis estate stands out because Lurman opted to focus much of the critical energy of his biopic on Colonel Tom Parker, who may as well be literally Satan as far as the Elvis estate is concerned. And through its focus on Parker, it becomes in part a study of the deumanizing effect of turning Elvis into a brand for mass consumption. Those who hate your son will do so whether we profit from it or not. What is hate worth if it's free?

[00:22:27]>> He also produced the mesmerizing concert film Epic, which is a triumph of maximalist concert film making that exists at the perfect intersection of the ven diagram of what a musician's estate wants and what Baz Lurman can deliver. Indeed, given that the Artha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace and the David Bowie concert film Moon Aage Daydream are both infinitely superior to the narrative dramas about their lives, there is an argument for those concert films as a solid compromise for estates who want to manage a stars image. But those movies don't make as much money as the conventional biopics, so that will never work. More broadly, the best modern biopics are a smaller artist less interested in being part of this vast capitalist machinery, focusing on regional acts in the same way that James Makavoy's California Scheman explores two Scottish hiphop artists who took the British music scene for a wild ride. Or the Northern Irish musical biopic kneecap, which is perhaps the most interesting film to feature Jerry Adams since that Jackie Chan movie. It's also worth shouting out the Robbie Williams biopic Betterman here, which works in large part because one of its central arcs involves Williams learning to be perfectly happy not being a global brand unto himself. It might be cabaret, but it's a worldclass cabaret, and I'm the [ __ ] best at it.

[00:23:41]>> But more often than not, you end up with something like Michael. The production of Michael was perhaps more similar to that of Bohemian Rapsidity than anyone would want. Indeed, reports of the movie's trouble production are emerging so fast that this may be the first YouTube video essay to be edited in real time. My personal favorite story to come out over the weekend is that the extra originally cast as John Landis, another celebrity our legal department gets very nervous when we talk about in the context of children was left go after voicing concerns about being raised in the air during a shot. You know, a production is going smoothly when the actor playing John Landis is raising issues of onset safety. The film involved the active participation of the Jackson estate with Michael being played by his own nephew Jafar Jackson.

[00:24:20]Reportedly, tensions between the Jackson estate and director Anton Fuqua reached such a point that Fugqua left the set to direct the movie from inside a van, leading to the cast and crew referring to him as Vanton Fuqua, which is a pretty good bit. Our legal department does require that I acknowledge Fua has since clarified that this report is exaggerated. He stresses that he in fact often directs his movies from inside a van. And actually, if you're asking, he kind of prefers to do it that way. So, make of that what you will. With this extremely hands-on involvement of the Jackson estate, there's a clear desire to protect the brand. Joe Jackson, who passed away 8 years ago, is a fair target, a villain that you love to hate.

[00:24:59]But everything else is sacrian. Janet just isn't in the movie. This approach caused some problems. Jackson was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct involving children, as has been well documented and articulated. The original plan for the film was to build to the first such case and to end the movie with the children accepting a cash settlement. The goal, according to those in the no, was to paint those children and their families as moneyhungry parasites looking to exploit a poor innocent pop star.

[00:25:27]>> Why do you think they're coming forward now?

[00:25:29]>> Money.

[00:25:30]>> You think it's all about money?

[00:25:32]>> It's all about money.

[00:25:32]>> It's always been about money. However, during production, the lawyers realized that one of the terms of the settlement was that it could not be narrativized in such a way. So, that plot thread had to be completely exised from the film. This incidentally is why the film doesn't really have a third act. Instead, opting to recreate Jackson's performance of bad at Wembley because that worked for Bohemian Raps City, right? Also, not to be conspiratorial, but it is worth noting that one of the strategies that the Jackson estate has consistently used to distract from abuse allegations is uploading these concerts to YouTube for fans for free. The Wembley 1988 Bad Concert was uploaded to the Michael Jackson YouTube channel precisely one day after the broadcast of Leaving Neverland, making the choice to include it here feel somewhat trollish. One of the more ghoullish aspects of the whole press tour has been the idea that that's the elimination of the allegations from the end of the first movie. They're being held back for a sequel.

[00:26:23]>> And there's a possibility of it being a part two that may deal with some other things that happened afterwards.

[00:26:28]>> But it sounds like there may be a sequel.

[00:26:30]>> Could be a sequel.

[00:26:31]>> There could be.

[00:26:32]>> It could be. We don't know yet.

[00:26:33]>> Price is right.

[00:26:35]>> It's all about money.

[00:26:36]>> It's always been about money. And look, I know these videos can be quite flippant and quite irreverent, but there is something decidedly bleak about the treatment of child abuse as a sequel hook. It really seems horrifically callous and cynical.

[00:26:50]>> There might be a a public outcry for a while, but then you know what happens?

[00:26:56]People forget. They don't remember. They don't care. They just don't care. It doesn't matter that nobody really thinks that much about Jackson performing bad at Wembley and that it certainly isn't comparable to Queen performing at Live Aid, but it's the thing you recognize, right? The result is a sanitization of Jackson's life both inside and outside the text. The estate negotiated with HBO to remove Leaving Neverland, a 4-hour documentary detailing two specific allegations of child sexual abuse by Jackson from their streaming service.

[00:27:27]It's important to note here, by the way, that the estate did not do this by reference to any actual content from the documentary, but instead by invoking a non-disparagement clause that the channel had signed in the early '90s in order to secure the rights to broadcast the concert film Michael Jackson in Concert in Bucharest, The Dangerous Tour. It's all about protecting the brand. This is an illustration of how tied up all this stuff is in brands.

[00:27:51]Michael isn't really about Michael Jackson. It's about reminding the audience of the iconography and the music of Michael Jackson, stimulating the nostalgia centers as a way of activating a consumer base. If the movie does have a perspective on Michael, it's that he was a sweet angel of man too good for this cursed earth. But the truth is that ultimately Michael sees its subject not as a person but as a product to be packaged.

[00:28:17]to jump back to Steve Jobs, which feels like something of an inflection point on this journey. There's a moment when John Scully talks about how he revolutionized lifestyle advertising at Pepsi. And for Scully, the key to that was in modeling consumption >> and we showed the product. We showed her being open. We showed her being poured, being consumed.

[00:28:36]>> This is in many ways what the modern musical biopic does. The stories are largely generic and bland. They are broadly feel-good, often emphasizing the heroism or the sanctity of their central characters. If those musicians are already dead, they can be presented as martyrs. There's an increased emphasis on performance, on including as much of the greatest hits as possible, and on recreating familiar and iconic moments because the goal isn't actually to say anything about these human beings, but instead to sell the brand. These aren't films, they're commercials. And looking at the box office and the way they've revived the brands in question, they're very successful ones because in the end ultimately it is all about money.

[00:29:19]>> It's always been about money.

[00:29:20]>> I've been Darren Mooney and this was the backdrop.

[00:29:39]Heat. Heat.

[00:29:59]Heat. Heat.