It was a massive own-goal for the Michael Jackson Estate.

Filming for Michael, the Jackson biopic out this week, had finished when an error was discovered, a very costly error.

The film’s original third act dealt with the 1993 allegations of child molestation brought by Jordan Chandler and his family – except that in the movie’s framing, the Chandlers, reportedly, would be depicted as lying opportunists, going so far as to portray the young child as misidentifying Jackson’s genital marks when in real life, he had accurately matched them.

The problem wasn’t that the film had done a complete 180 on established facts, it’s that it wasn’t allowed to dramatise the Chandlers at all because of a clause in the legal settlement with the family.

The Estate had somehow overlooked this, and was now personally on the hook for the expensive reshoots which cost, according to reports, either $US15 million (Variety) or $US50 million (Puck).

Expensive to most, but barely a drop for an Estate that is worth more than $US2 billion, a remarkable turnaround from the $US500 million debt it was in when Jackson died in 2009.

It is one of the great commercial success stories of the 21st century – the deliberate, calculated and carefully managed image rehabilitation of a problematic man whose public reputation at death had been dogged by years of multiple allegations of child abuse and general eccentricities.

Almost two decades after Jackson’s death at 50 from a heart attack caused by a prescription drug overdose, he is more popular than he was when he was alive, at least in the later years of his life when he was derisively known as Wacko Jacko.

The Michael film has triggered unquestioning, enthusiastic support from his diehard fans, and they are legion. It’s a review-proof (and the reviews are bad, including a one-star pan from The Nightly) movie because the MJ-heads will turn out no matter what.

The changed film now ends in 1988, five years before the first molestation accusations emerged, and is a sanitised exercise in mythmaking in which Jackson is recast as a lonely musical genius who just wanted to be loved and to love.

Those who have always defended him against all the paedophilia allegations, which Jackson and the Estate have denied, will undoubtedly feel vindicated by what tracking has predicted as a huge box office haul.

The current projections are the film’s worldwide opening weekend will hit $US150 million, and is in line to become the highest grossing musical biopic of all time. Bohemian Rhapsody, which looks like a cinematic masterpiece next to Michael, holds the record at $US910 million.

Ahead of the US and Canadian release on Friday, it opened in a raft of international markets such as Australia. Since Wednesday, it has already collected $US18.5 million, including $1.4 million locally.

The only thing more lucrative than an un-cancelled martyr is a dead un-cancelled martyr.

It’s no accident that Jackson’s brand has been on the upswing in recent years. The Estate has been busy.

In addition to this dramatised biopic which stars Jackson’s nephew by way of his brother Jermaine, Jaafar Jackson, as the late pop star, it also has the stage production, MJ the Musical, which has been touring Australia since last year.

MJ the Musical recouped its initial $US22 million investment in just over a year in 2023 and has earnt tens of millions more since. The story of that musical also, conveniently, ends before the abuse allegations.

There’s a second Cirque du Soleil show based on his works, One, that has a permanent home at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, following the previous production, Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour.

Jackson has 68 million monthly listeners on Spotify, a number that will surely climb with the release of the film. Ticket sales to those shows are also likely to see an uptick.

The Estate is run for the benefit of his three children – Prince, 29, Paris, 27 and Bigi, formerly known as Blanket, 24 – and his mother, Katherine. But the co-executors of the Estate are lawyer John Branca, who was involved with the Michael film and is a character in the movie, played by Miles Teller, and reclusive music executive John McClain.

Paris Jackson has been involved in skirmishes with her father’s Estate for some years, and has even unsuccessfully tried to sue the executors, accusing them of paying themselves and other lawyers too much.

Paris has, according to the Estate, received $US65 million from it so far, which included annual expenses and the purchase of property. Paris does not support the movie and has said it was an untruthful “sugar-coated” version of her father’s life designed to appeal to hardcore fans’ fantasies.

Janet Jackson also declined to sign over her likeness rights to the producers and is completely absent from Michael.

Among the other revenue generating activities of the Estate include a 2024 deal with Sony to sell a significant portion of Jackson’s music catalogue for $US600 million.

There was also the 2009 posthumous concert movie, This is It, which grossed $US267 million, and various royalties still flowing from Universal Music, The Wiz movie ($50 in 2021, according to records tendered in court) and other former commercial partners including Capital One.

It was, however, locked in a long-running battle with the US tax office over what the government agency claimed was a significantly undervaluing of its assets.

The more Jackson is in the conversation, the more you know about his Estate’s commercial success, the more people feel emboldened to (re)embrace their love for his work. Because they know that if that many around the world can compartmentalise the more unsavoury aspects, then they can too.

It’s much easier to lionise someone who’s dead, and you can now draw a line under all that strange behaviour – the surgeries, Bubbles the chimp and the rest of his menagerie, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, Neverland Ranch, dangling his baby over a balcony, his marriage to Debbie Rowe, attempting to buy the bones of the Elephant Man – which created the Wacko Jacko narrative during his lifetime.

There was a threat to the Estate’s ongoing profitability in 2019 when the documentary Finding Neverland pierced the zeitgeist. But even that seems to have, seven years on, become just a blip.

The Estate are known to aggressively defend any allegations and claims of child abuse, whether those already in the public sphere or have emerged since Jackson’s death.

The continuing pipeline of riches from Jackson’s work relies on most people either disbelieving the alleged victims who are explicitly portrayed by the Estate as opportunistic or greedy liars, or finding the accusations fuzzy enough for it to be an “in despite of” so as to not disrupt their love of his undeniably amazing music.

If you look at fans’ comments on social media this week under posts about the film, many have mentioned how “grateful” they were that the movie didn’t go into the molestation accusations. They don’t want to know, they don’t want it to be a part of his story.

Dan Reed is the filmmaker behind Leaving Neverland and he told The Hollywood Reporter this week he went into the documentary as a sceptic but came out through the process believing James Safechuck and Wade Robson’s very detailed and clear-eyed accounts alleging Jackson had groomed and sexually abused them when they were children.

The film was quietly removed from HBO in 2024 after the Estate pursued the network, using a legal technicality. HBO had signed a contract with Jackson in 1992 to broadcast a concert from Budapest, and that decades-old document contained a non-disparagement in perpetuity clause.

Reed added that he wasn’t trying to stop anyone from listening to Jackson’s music, but that people shouldn’t forget the whole context when they’re bopping along.

“How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?

“If anyone’s making money, it’s Michael Jackson’s Estate and the people who worked on this biographical picture.”