Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma said he “hates” Michael Jackson after watching the legendary singer-dancer’s biopic, as it brought back painful memories of his death in 2009.
Varma recalled waking up to television headlines announcing the pop icon’s death as he struggled to believe that the “impossible” had happened.
“After watching Michael, my memory went back to that horrible day — June 25, 2009 — when I slept late with the television still murmuring like a ghost in the darkness of my room. As I groggily woke up in the morning, my eyes fell on those terrible white letters against black: ‘Michael Jackson is Dead.’ For several long seconds, I thought this must be a nightmare. Why the hell would I even dream something so horrible? But the banner on the TV stayed, and the news ticker kept crawling. I reached for the remote and started switching channels, and all the anchors were speaking with the same solemn gravity. That’s when I finally realised the impossible had happened,” the Satya director wrote on X on Friday.
Varma also recalled being introduced to Michael Jackson in January 1984 by a friend during his engineering college days in Vijayawada. The friend has dragged him into “a dingy video parlour”, shared Varma.
“It was not just a song or a dance. It was an invasion. My eyes, conditioned by a lifetime of mediocrity, were violently pried open. The production, the choreography, the seamless ecstasy blended into one single divine entity. It was spectacle on a level I had never imagined possible, and at the centre of that storm was him — Michael Jackson. He didn’t move like a human being. He glided, he exploded, he floated, he commanded the screen like a supernatural entity who had entered a human body for a few minutes of absolute dominance,” he wrote.
“I walked out of that parlour in a complete daze, my heart racing, my mind reeling. This cannot be a real person. He has to be God — or at least a fantasy sculpted by the gods to bless us mortals on Earth,” Varma said, adding that every subsequent song released by Jackson only raised the bar, while the controversies surrounding the singer never bothered him.
Explaining why he “hates” Michael Jackson, Varma wrote, “I hate Michael Jackson for dying. I hate him for proving that even he was human. I hate that he too needed oxygen and blood like the rest of us. I hate that his heart could stop beating too. I hate that I lived long enough to see those words on CNN: ‘Michael Jackson’s body sent to mortuary.’”
“I love you more than I can express in words. Wherever you are now, in whatever dimension, I am sure you are moonwalking across galaxies, creating space storms with a brilliance even the stars cannot contain,” he concluded.
Michael is directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan. The film traces Michael Jackson’s journey from his early years with the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to the Bad World Tour in the late 1980s. Jackson is portrayed by his nephew Jaafar Jackson, with Juliano Valdi playing the younger version of the singer.
The supporting cast includes Nia Long, Laura Harrier, Mike Myers, Miles Teller and Colman Domingo. According to industry tracking platform Box Office Mojo, the film has grossed USD 716 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 2026 and the fourth-highest-grossing biographical film of all time.
