Michael Jackson: The Movie - Coming Disappointingly Soon

In his lifetime, Michael Jackson flourished in all mediums - music, films about gay-looking scarecrows.

Really long, slightly tedious music videos. All of them. But what about horrifying, legacy-destroying, drug-addled posthumous 3D tour rehearsal movies? Michael Jackson rules at those, too - Sony will apparently buy the rights to Michael Jackson’s final rehearsal footage, and the High School Musical director will release it before Christmas.

That’s if he can animate the six-foot dancing Plasticine rabbit in time, because a Michael Jackson movie without a Plasticine rabbit is like a Michael Jackson story without a shoehorned-in reference to Jesus Juice - weird and incomplete.

Michael Jackson may have died, but he hasn’t left us. Every time someone breaks free of the shackles of normality and bursts into dance, he’s still with us. Every time someone sings with a passion that defies their slight frame, he’s still with us. Every time someone loads up on a dangerous amount of medical anaesthetic and locks themselves away in their heavily fortified bedroom with an uncomfortable number of children, he’s still with us.

And for those of us without the imagination to remember Michael Jackson that way, there’s always the upcoming Michael Jackson concert rehearsal movie to fall back on. True, from what we’ve seen of it, you’ll be remembering a frail-looking man with an upsettingly disfigured face who halfheartedly paces through a number of dance moves that he clearly has no intention of ever performing in public, but whatever.

And you won’t have long to wait to see it, either - according to reports, Sony is about to buy 80 hours of rehearsal footage from AEG for $50 million, and it’ll be turned into a movie by High School Musical director Kenny Ortega by the end of the year.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course - it’s not like one of the last things that Michael Jackson did before he died was record a career-tarnishing new version of the iconic Thriller video in 3D so that audiences could use it to see exactly how much he’d squandered his life on drugs and needless cosmetic surgery procedures. Was it? Was it, Variety?

Sony Pictures is close to a deal to make a feature film on Michael Jackson drawing on the 80 hours of rehearsal footage filmed for concerts Jackson was preparing to perform in London. The film will feature at least three videos, including an alternative version of Jackson’s “Thriller,” which were shot to be interstitial programming during the concerts. The footage was meant to play in 3-D.