"Expensive karaoke"

"I am not here to prosecute Michael Jackson or Michael the film (I won’t be seeing it), but it has driven me to once again say: we need a moratorium on musical biopics. ...

"In recent years we’ve seen biopics about Bob Dylan, Elton John, (two about) Elvis, Robbie Williams, Bruce Springsteen and Amy Winehouse. In production currently are FOUR Beatles biopics, with a separate feature film planned for each member. As with a lot of these movies, the conversation tends to revolve around who is playing the character, how much they look like them or not, how much they sound like them or not (anyone remember months of conversation about Austin Butler’s Elvis voice?), whether the movie is true to life, and so on.

"The main characters of biopics are so familiar to us that the discussion and viewing experience often centres on comparison over content. These are people we are already familiar with, stories we already know, performances we’ve already seen the real versions of. The worst result is essentially expensive karaoke.

"Aren’t we tired? Wouldn’t it be a good time after four individual Beatles movies to have a break from this genre? ... At least Robbie Williams tried something new by making himself into a monkey. ..."

~ Rebecca Shaw from her column 'Please stop making music biopics. We need a break from this tired genre that is essentially expensive karaoke'

"All this might not be so bad if musician biopics weren’t so fake. The whitewashing of Michael Jackson is just another example of the phoniness. I’m now old enough to watch films of this sort where I knew personally some of the people portrayed onscreen, and the gap between the film and reality is wider than Snake River Canyon—and way too wide to jump if you care at all about the real artists and real history behind these films."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Hottest Musician in 2026 Is 'Problematic' Michael Jackson'