Michael Jackson’s biopic Michael just took a bigger bite out of box office history. As of Sunday, July 12, the film has grossed $1.002 billion worldwide. In the same snapshot, Freddie Mercury’s biopic Bohemian Rhapsody sits at $911 million. So yes, the race is not just close. It has a clear front-runner, and the gap is wide enough to matter.

This also resolves a bigger question that executives care about: where does a music biopic land on the broader “biopic” leaderboard? Michael is now the top-grossing biopic of all time, not only the top-grossing musician biopic. It has overtaken Christopher Nolan’s 2023 biopic Oppenheimer, which has grossed $975.8 million worldwide. Oppenheimer was a high-water mark for seriousness and mainstream scale. Michael surpassing it is a reminder that even today, prestige storytelling and mass entertainment can still combine into a single commercial machine.

The revenue mix is another tell. Based on Box Office Mojo figures, international ticket sales account for 62.9% of Michael’s worldwide box office total to date, with the remainder coming from the U.S. and Canada. By comparison, international ticket sales accounted for 76.2% of Bohemian Rhapsody’s worldwide total. Translation: both films are international hits, but Michael’s dominance is proportioned differently. That matters for anyone modeling worldwide performance, because it hints that the film’s momentum might rely less on the most globally concentrated demand and more on a broader spread across markets.

And the “why” is not just about marketing budgets or star power, though both help. The source points to a deeper symmetry between the two subject artists, which often plays out in how audiences connect to the story. Both rose to fame in groups, The Jackson 5 and Queen, respectively. Both are widely seen as two of the greatest showmen of all time. Both died years before their time, with Mercury dying in 1991 at age 45 of complications from AIDS, and Jackson dying in 2009 at age 50 of cardiac arrest caused by acute propofol intoxication.

There is also a documented cross-current in their legacies. The source says Jackson attended Queen concerts in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, they occasionally met for dinner, and they recorded three demo tracks together that went unfinished. Beyond that, each artist’s catalog powered successful theatrical productions. The Queen musical We Will Rock You opened on London’s West End in 2002. MJ: The Musical has been a fixture on Broadway since Dec. 6, 2021. For investors and studio executives, this matters because it is a signal of multi-platform staying power. When the music lives on in theater, it tends to keep audience familiarity hot, which can support film performance across releases and geographies.

Now zoom out to the production and deal architecture, because the people behind these movies are not random. Graham King co-produced Michael with longtime Jackson associates John Branca and John McClain (who died on May 26 at age 71). King also co-produced Bohemian Rhapsody and a third music biopic on Billboard’s list of music biopics, Jersey Boys, the story of the Four Seasons. When the same production talent appears across multiple high performers, it changes how boards think about repeatability. It is not a guarantee, but it does suggest operational strengths in story packaging, rights navigation, and audience calibration.

Billboard’s list itself adds another layer of constraint and context. The outlet says it did not include a few high-grossing films about real-life music personalities because the subjects are not well-known music stars in their own right. It explicitly mentions exclusions such as The Sound of Music, Green Book, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Music of the Heart. The source also notes Meryl Streep starred in the latter two films. This is a quiet reminder that “biopic success” is not purely about cinematic quality. It is about how central the subject is to mass cultural recognition, and how clearly the public can connect the story to the artist’s public identity.

All of this is why the Michael versus Bohemian Rhapsody and Michael versus Oppenheimer story is more than trivia for film people. It sets a benchmark for what “top” even means in today’s theatrical market. When a music biopic becomes the first biopic to top $1 billion in worldwide grosses and does it by pulling past an industry-defining blockbuster like Oppenheimer, it reframes the financial ceiling for similar projects. For studios, boards, and capital allocators, the strategic stakes are simple: underwriting the next slate requires knowing whether this is a one-off viral moment or a repeatable global appetite for star-driven, story-forward music cinema.