It’s been weeks since Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, was released in theatres, and the internet has once again found itself orbiting the gravity of The King of Pop. Across streaming platforms, his catalogue reportedly surged in listens over the film’s opening weekend, while old interviews, performances, and concert clips have resurfaced online in waves. Even though reactions to the biopic itself have been sharply divided, the renewed conversation around Jackson has once again revealed the sheer scale of his cultural legacy.
But beyond the music, the choreography, and the mythology that has long surrounded him, Michael Jackson’s most radical contribution to pop culture may have been the way he transformed the trajectory of music video. If there was one moment that announced this transformation to the world in clear terms, it came in late 1983, when a music video was treated with the grandeur and anticipation usually reserved for Hollywood cinema.
On the night of November 14, 1983, Hollywood showed up for the premiere of a music video directed by John Landis, the filmmaker behind An American Werewolf in London. The event drew a star-studded crowd, with Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, Prince, and Eddie Murphy gathering at the Crest Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles. When the 14-minute short film ended, Eddie Murphy reportedly stood and screamed, “Encore! Show the goddamn thing again!” And they did.
It was, in many ways, a canon event for modern pop culture. The short film was Thriller, by the legendary Michael Jackson, and from that night forward, nothing in the world of popular music would ever be quite the same. This is not to say that music videos did not exist before Jackson, or that artistes had not experimented with visual storytelling long before Thriller. In fact, Jackson himself had released the music video for “Billie Jean” months earlier.
But Thriller expanded the possibilities of the medium on a scale the industry had never seen before. What Jackson understood, long before the rest of the industry caught up, was that the music video was not just a promotional tool but a medium in its own right, with the capacity to tell stories, move bodies, challenge power, and produce images so indelible they would outlast the songs themselves.
Over the course of his career, he pursued that idea by working with some of Hollywood’s most visionary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, John Singleton, David Fincher, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch, who helped him build what remains the most extraordinary body of visual work in the history of popular music.
Before the Revolution: The Music Video in Its Early Form
To understand what Michael Jackson did, you first have to understand the landscape within which he was operating. Before 1983, the music video was barely taken seriously. In fact, it was often treated as an afterthought, and many artistes did not even release videos for their songs. When they did, it typically featured the artiste miming in front of studio lights or flashing graphics, with little narrative depth or visual ambition to capture the emotional world of the music itself.
Although The Beatles had experimented with promotional clips in the 1960s, and Queen’s 1975 promo for Bohemian Rhapsody showed the medium’s cinematic potential, these were exceptions in a landscape that had not yet decided what it wanted to be.
When MTV launched in 1981 with the mission of piping music videos into American living rooms around the clock, much of what it aired was barely a step above a television commercial.
However, MTV had largely constructed itself as a rock ’n’ roll channel, which in practice often meant a white channel, and videos by Black artistes were rarely placed into heavy rotation. As American filmmaker Bob Giraldi, who would later direct “Beat It,” recalled, the network operated with an unspoken culture of exclusion that became increasingly difficult to maintain once Jackson arrived.
In 1983, Jackson released “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” in quick succession, and both videos were unlike anything on MTV: cinematic in their choreography, urgent in their storytelling, and anchored by a filmmaker whose command of the camera was without parallel. For “Beat It,” Jackson spent $150,000 of his own money after CBS/Epic refused to fund it, and he pushed Giraldi to cast real members of the Bloods and the Crips alongside professional dancers, an idea the director initially resisted but ultimately could not argue against.
“Michael was always about peace,” Giraldi said in an interview with Boards. “He was always about some sort of peace offering. That was his idea.” The result was one of the most politically charged videos ever made, with real gang members watching, almost in awe, as dancers moved among them. Giraldi remembered looking at the faces of the Crips and Bloods as Jackson performed and watching their expressions shift into something unguarded and almost tender. That, he said, was what made the whole evening work.
MTV’s resistance eventually crumbled, and Michael Jackson was rightly credited as the first truly crossover artiste of his generation, as well as the man who forced the network to rethink its platform entirely. Then came “Thriller,” eight months later, a short film that revolutionized the entire music video landscape through John Landis’ directing vision and the Hollywood-grade makeup effects of Oscar-winning artiste Rick Baker.
The budget was reportedly $500,000, which was nearly five times the average cost of a music video at the time, and CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff allegedly screamed when he heard the figure, with Jackson eventually funding part of it himself rather than abandon the vision. The film debuted with a Hollywood premiere, aired hourly on MTV for weeks, and reportedly doubled the domestic sales of the Thriller album almost overnight.
Reflecting on the growing ambition and scale of music videos in an interview with Rolling Stone, John Taylor of Duran Duran put it plainly: “After Michael Jackson, when American artistes got a sense of the potency of a well-thought-out video, everything became more expensive.”
“Thriller” was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2009, becoming the first music video ever to receive that honor. But its real legacy is far more sweeping than any single award: it ended the era of the music video as a promotional afterthought and ushered in the era of the music video as art.
The Rise of Cinematic Pop Music Videos
What distinguished Michael Jackson from every other artiste working in the medium was not just his willingness to spend money, though he spent it like no one else, but his instinct for collaboration and his clarity about what kind of collaborators he needed. Instead of choosing to work with music video directors, he hired filmmakers, approaching each project the way a studio head might commission a short film: with a concept and strong, captivating story.
According to Rolling Stone’s interview with Scorsese, when Jackson came to Scorsese in 1986 for the title track of Bad, his comeback album that became the follow-up to the biggest record in history, he met the director for the first time at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and what Scorsese remembered was not the pop star but the intellectual curiosity. “The first thing he asked me was, do you know about Michelangelo?” Scorsese recalled. “And I said, Yes! And we started talking about Michelangelo. He’d just discovered his paintings, the Sistine Chapel and the sculptures. He was taken by all of that.”
What followed was an 18-minute short film, written by novelist Richard Price and shot over six weeks in Brooklyn, in the subway station at Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets and in the Harlem tenements where a then-unknown Wesley Snipes played the gang leader Mini Max, beginning in black and white in the realist grammar of Scorsese’s New York pictures before bursting into color for the choreographed subway showdown, a sequence directly referencing West Side Story, with the dance scene alone taking two and a half weeks to shoot. “I was mesmerized by it,” Scorsese said of watching Jackson perform. “The video monitor made us all dancers.”
But it was one of the intimate moments that stayed with Martin Scorsese the longest. Walking through Harlem during the shoot, Michael Jackson looked at the condemned buildings across the street and quietly pulled the director aside to ask, “Do people live here?” The question, Scorsese later recalled, felt so genuine and unguarded that he was overwhelmed by Jackson’s compassion, something he said came through in the performance in a deeply moving way. After Jackson’s death in 2009, Scorsese’s tribute remained characteristically sparse and precise: “When we worked together on “Bad,” I was in awe of his absolute mastery of movement on the one hand and of the music on the other.”
If Bad was Jackson’s New York film, then Remember the Time (1992) was his African epic. To direct it, Jackson turned to John Singleton, who at the time had just become the first Black filmmaker, and the youngest person ever, to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director thanks to Boyz n the Hood. Singleton reportedly agreed to direct the project on one condition: that the cast be entirely Black, a request Jackson accepted enthusiastically.
Set in a lavish reimagining of Ancient Egypt, the short film unfolds with the scale and theatricality of a Hollywood historical epic. The production design is immense, filled with towering palace interiors, dancers, elaborate costumes, and gold-toned imagery that pushed the visual ambition of music videos even further. Jackson appears before the Pharaoh in a striking gold top and sheer sarong, moving through the palace with the poise of both a pop star and a mythic figure. From the very beginning, Remember the Time presents a magnetic cast and an instantly captivating atmosphere, making it almost impossible not to become completely absorbed in the video from the moment it begins.
Singleton later recalled how the collaboration began, with a prank phone call from a friend doing a high-pitched impression of Jackson at three in the morning, and how by the time he walked into the actual meeting, Jackson had already made up his mind about what he wanted the film to be. “Michael was such a student of dance and movement,” Singleton said. “He gave me DVDs of Busby Berkeley musicals, and we incorporated that into the body of the piece, but with a hip-hop element to it.” The video premiered simultaneously on ABC, NBC, Fox, BET, and MTV, a broadcast event on the scale of a national television moment rather than a music video rollout.
In 1996, Jackson made perhaps the boldest choice of his career when he brought Spike Lee to Brazil for They Don’t Care About Us, a protest film set in a Rio de Janeiro favela and alongside 200 drummers from the Afro-Brazilian cultural group Olodum in Salvador, with state authorities attempting to ban the shoot over fears it would damage Brazil’s Olympic bid, a judge issuing an injunction that was overturned, and Lee’s team, by his own account, having to negotiate safe passage with a local drug lord because the Brazilian police refused to climb the hills of the favela.
Jackson had invited Lee to pick any song from the HIStory album, and Lee chose “Stranger in Moscow,” but Jackson overruled him with certainty that defined how he operated: “The song you want is ‘They Don’t Care About Us.’” He explained his thinking in a line that captured his whole philosophy of the form, “It’s a public awareness song, and that’s what Spike Lee is all about”, and he was right, because the video, which exposed Olodum to 140 countries and prompted the mayor of Rio to erect a statue of Jackson in Dona Marta years later, is among the most politically significant pieces of visual work any pop artiste has ever produced.
Then there was David Lynch, whom Jackson telephoned in 1991 to make a 30-second teaser for the Dangerous album, and who almost said no because he had no ideas, but then hung up, walked toward the hall, and found that ideas were suddenly everywhere. What Lynch built was a miniature world of red curtains, lacquered trees, and silver fluid that erupts in flame to reveal Jackson’s face floating in a bubble, and when they finally met on set, after Jackson had spent eight to ten hours in makeup, all he wanted to talk about was the Elephant Man, whose bones and cloak he had once tried to buy from a museum, peppering Lynch with questions about him until the moment came to step in front of the camera, at which point the whole thing was done in a minute.
And in 1995, to announce his return after the crisis years, Jackson made Scream with director Mark Romanek and his sister Janet. For this production, 13 sets were built across the Universal Studios backlot, and the whole film was shot in black and white on a spacecraft designed as a sanctuary from a world that had become unbearable. “Scream’s” video cost was $7 million, a Guinness World Record for the most expensive music video ever made.
Michael Jackson’s Legacy: The Blueprint for Modern Visual Music
A look back at the body of Jackson’s work, what becomes clear is a consistent and evolving film language that Jackson developed across decades and across collaborators without ever losing its authorial coherence. He understood choreography as storytelling, with bodies communicating what words could not, and he understood narrative structure – the slow build, the false beginning, the act break – in ways that most directors working in the form at the time had not yet begun to think about.
He understood the political force of casting, so that the all-Black “Remember the Time” and the gang members of “Beat It” and the Santa Marta Favela residents of “They Don’t Care About Us” were not incidental details but deliberate statements, and he understood that the camera could be an instrument of intimacy as much as spectacle.
He also understood money as a creative language of its own, spending $150,000 out of his own pocket on Beat It when CBS refused, funding part of Thriller himself when the label pushed back, and eventually reaching $7 million for Scream, they are a statement that the work deserved the resources of cinema because it was cinema. He said as much himself, in a Fox News interview that captured the simplicity of his conviction: “That’s what drives me. It’s the medium, the art. I love it. And that’s the world I’m most comfortable in.”
The artistes who came after him learned from all of it, whether they acknowledge it or not. Beyoncé’s Lemonade, a 65-minute visual album commissioned from a single director and released as a complete cinematic statement, is unthinkable without the template Jackson built, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” carries his spirit of political choreography, while Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” walks the same line between entertainment and confrontation that “They Don’t Care About Us” walked decades earlier.
In 1988, MTV presented Jackson with its Video Vanguard Award, and three years later, the honor was renamed the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, the highest recognition the network gives for achievement in music video artistry.
It has been 17 years since Michael Jackson’s death, but his revolutionary impact on the art of music videos will continue to shape music video culture for generations to come. His undying legacy, perhaps, fuels Michael, the biopic.
