8 Major Movies Michael Jackson Almost Starred In
With Michael currently smashing box office records despite it all, it looks like Michael Jackson’s legend and music have yet to lose their hold over his legions of fans and the cinema-going public.
The movie's $217 million opening box office weekend is the kind of haul that the one time King of Pop could have only dreamed of in the handful of times that he did step in front of the camera, but if he’d managed to land a few of the jobs that he is alleged to have wanted over the years, there were a few chances where something similar could have happened.
Outside of his many iconic music videos (which were directed by everyone from John Landis and David Fincher to Spike Lee), Jackson’s screen appearances fall into two small categories: movies and shows in which he played a version of himself (like Moonwalker, his cameo in Men in Black II, or his excellent Simpsons episode) and the few times when he was cast to play someone else (like The Wiz). Looking back, it’s strange that there were so few of the latter, as the actor was repeatedly linked to film projects during the height of his fame, but for one reason or another, they just didn’t pan out.
In the list below, which I’ve arranged in no particular order, I’ve rounded up eight major motion picture roles that Michael Jackson was linked with — many of which are now considered modern classics, and some of which came a whole lot closer to happening than you’d think. Read on to learn a bit more about each one and use the guide to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Given the amount of hatred that Jar Jar Binks and the actor who played him, Ahmed Best, received around the movie’s release in 1999, Jackson might have dodged a bullet by not taking on the role of the clumsy but endearing Gungan in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. The story goes that Lucas seriously considered the singer for the role, but Jackson was far more keen on playing a fully CGI-generated character rather than the motion-captured role that Jar Jar eventually became.
Thankfully, the Jar Jar hatred has cooled significantly since Episode 1 has been reevaluated in recent years and has re-earned its reputation as a cosy nostalgia watch; and Best, god bless him, has even continued to be a part of the Star Wars universe, appearing as Jar Jar in Episodes II and III and playing Kelleran Beq in Season 3 of The Mandalorian. Sliding doors.
Given that Jackson named his ranch Neverland, the place that Peter Pan travels to to escape the responsibilities of adult life and be a kid forever, you won’t be surprised to learn that the singer dreamed of playing the character in a movie.
The singer’s obsession with Pan inspired him to write a song about the character in 1983 and plan a theme park based on the stories in the late ‘90s, but the closest he came to actually playing him was in a Steven Spielberg movie that eventually became Hook. The story goes that Spielberg originally envisioned it as a musical with Jackson in the lead, apparently after being overwhelmed by MJ’s narration for the audiobook of E.T.
According to a report by Collider, Jackson simply got too busy after the success of Thriller, and the project had to be put on hold. It was later reimagined as a story about an adult Pan who rediscovers his inner child — a role which would famously go to Robin Williams.
Having announced himself with three hugely successful movies in the 1980s (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman), Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, just his second original screenplay, was always going to be one of the hottest projects in Hollywood.
This meant that actors as far ranging as Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, who were both fledgling movie stars at the time, coming off the back of movies like Big and Cocktail respectively, reached out to Burton about the role, as did Michael Jackson, who might have done a pretty decent job as Burton’s handsome riff on Frankenstein. The role went to Johnny Depp instead, who made it iconically his own.
If certain reports are to be believed, Scissorhands wasn’t the last time Jackson reached out to Burton regarding a role, nor was it the last time that Depp pipped him to it. The movie in question was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton’s 2005 adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic about a young man who finds a golden ticket in a sweet wrapper and travels to meet the man behind the bar, who was, of course, portrayed wonderfully by Gene Wilder in the 1971 original.
Unlike Scissorhands, however, there is no strong information out there that Jackson — who loved the book and is rumoured to have attempted to option the rights for some time — was ever in serious consideration. By 2005, Depp and Burton were practically synonymous with each other, and the filmmaker surely developed the project with him in mind. An interesting one to think of, all the same.
Pre-Titanic, James Cameron’s script for Spider-Man — rumoured to have been a more adult take than what we eventually got from Sam Raimi (and even more eventually got from the MCU) — has gone down as one of the great “What Ifs” of the 1990s, but what about the Spider-Man that could have happened if Michael Jackson had acquired the rights?
In an interview with the Associated Press in the late ‘00s, Stan Lee confirmed that Jackson “wanted to be Spider-Man”, and the pop legend went so far as to pursue the material only to get caught up (in typical Spidey fashion) in a web of complicated rights issues. Would the resulting film have been more of a musical, like that infamous Broadway disaster? It’s possible, but I’d certainly like to have seen it.
Another role that Jackson is rumoured to have wanted was that of Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men. Rumours on this one are a little more sketchy, but Rolling Stone did report in 2020 that the singer visited director Bryan Singer and the movie’s producers to lobby for the role.
In the end, the part famously went to Patrick Stewart, who has since played Xavier in various movies and guises for a quarter-century and counting. Look out for him in Avengers: Doomsday later this year.
One movie role that Jackson was considered for that probably won’t come as too much of a surprise was the Troll King in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth — an ‘80s classic that will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year.
The story follows a teenage girl (a breakout role for Jennifer Connelly) as she enters a dark and magical world to save her baby brother. This realm is populated by various trolls, each of which was dreamed up in Henson’s legendary puppet studio, but Henson wanted their king to be played by an otherworldly human actor. Sting (who’d just appeared in Dune) was considered, as was Jackson, but the role eventually went to David Bowie.
Of all the Jackson parts on this list, it’s the easiest one to imagine.
Last on our list is Batman Forever, which is, depending on your tastes, probably the least loved Batman movie ever — at least if you’re able to enjoy Batman and Robin for the camp classic that it is. For this one, Jackson apparently called director Joel Schumacher (at least according to Schumacher) multiple times to ask to play The Riddler, but Schumacher decided to go for a much subtler option instead.
I kid. It went, of course, to the elastic man himself, Jim Carrey, who, after the enormous triple success of Ace Venture, Dumb and Dumber and The Mask in 1994, was one of the most red-hot actors in Hollywood at the time, so fair enough.
Still, squint a little, and you can kind of imagine this one, too.
