Welcome back to ON THE LOT.
In today’s edition: Paris Jackson’s fight with the producers of the Michael Jackson movie, former “Bachelor” producer Michael Carroll and contestant Kelley Flanagan on the Taylor Frankie Paul fallout, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser‘s probe of the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal, directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell on keeping it real in the age of AI, and this week’s recommendations from industry insiders.
Got tips (on Stephen Colbert’s “Lord of the Rings” movie or Bob Iger’s finsta)? You can reach me at rebecca.keegan@nbcuni.com or on Signal at thatrebecca.82.
WANNA BE STARTIN’ SOMETHIN’
The upcoming Michael Jackson biopic, “Michael,” was intended to reclaim the troubled pop star’s legacy for his fans and make some money for his family.
The film comes as the Jackson estate has repeatedly denied child abuse accusations against the late star over the years. But a month before “Michael” finally hits theaters, the movie’s producers and co-executors of Jackson’s estate, John Branca and John McClain, are mired in an ugly legal fight with Jackson’s own kids. The estate has been in probate for a stunning 17 years since Jackson died in 2009, leaving behind his three children, Prince, now 29, Paris, 27, and Bigi (formerly Blanket), 24.
In recent legal filings, Paris Jackson has raised questions about the movie, which underwent costly reshoots in 2025, and said she wants more transparency and timelier accounting from Branca and McClain. Paris had previously distanced herself from “Michael,” calling the film “sugar-coated” and “dishonest” in her Instagram stories last September.
“Michael,” which is directed by Antoine Fuqua and produced by Graham King (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), stars Michael’s nephew Jaafar Jackson, son of Jermaine Jackson, as the pop star, with Colman Domingo as his father and Nia Long as his mother.
“Top Gun: Maverick” star Miles Teller is playing Branca, who was Michael’s on-again, off-again entertainment lawyer while the singer was alive. That casting decision apparently drew added scrutiny from Paris, whose attorneys in November submitted a filing to L.A. Superior Court that accused the estate of becoming “the vehicle for John Branca to enrich and aggrandize himself, rather than serve the beneficiaries’ best interests and steadfastly preserve her father’s legacy.”
“Undoubtedly Mr. Branca considers his story to be central to the Michael Jackson story,” the filing states. “Nonetheless, it is unclear how this peculiar and presumably costly casting decision will result in commensurate box office receipts.”
Teller’s appearance in the trailer in a feathered, 1980s-style wig and prosthetic nose caught the eyes of fans, but Branca’s role in the story has likely diminished since Teller was cast. After production on “Michael” was underway, producers were forced to remove a storyline about an accuser to comply with the terms of a settlement the estate had reached with the child’s family.
The removal of the storyline, which Paris’ filing says may be attributed to “Mr. Branca’s lack of experience producing dramatic feature films,” forced producers to alter the third act of the movie, adding to its budget and pushing the release date back by a year.
In a March 19 filing, the estate’s lawyers fired back at Paris, saying that her objections to its management are “without merit,” accusing her of “staging tabloid press photo ops” and “strutting into hearings.” The filing highlights Branca and McClain’s role in making the estate billions via a concert documentary, Broadway musical and Cirque du Soleil show. “The Executors recognize that they are, by definition, the ‘grown-ups’ here,” the filing reads.
Paris has been joined by her siblings in her petition for more transparency and timeliness from the estate, and this week the judge approved a schedule for the estate to submit expenses. The judge allowed Branca and McClain to wait until April 2027 to report their 2025 accounting. Presumably by next year, “Michael,” which Lionsgate is releasing in the U.S., will have earned back those reshoot costs.
Jonathan Steinsapir, an attorney for the estate, told NBC News in a statement: “The vast majority of her ‘claims’ have been either approved by her legal team or by the court in prior years’ accounting, but those facts have been routinely ignored by her attorneys. Others are based on false or misleading information.”
Paris “has already received roughly $65 million in benefits and stands to inherit many hundreds of millions more,” the statement reads. “This is from an estate that was $500 million in debt and facing bankruptcy at the time of Michael’s death but was turned by the executors into a business generating billions in revenue.”
When asked for comment, a representative for Paris referred NBC News to a March 16 legal filing in which Paris took issue with that number.
The estate “did not provide any calculations to Paris or the Court of how they arrived at that figure, which Paris disputes as outright false and which Executors have refused to substantiate,” the filing reads. It also states that executors had received total compensation of $148,252,657 from the estate through the end of 2021, “which dwarfs any amount distributed to Paris or her siblings.”
THE WRONG REASONS
As the Taylor Frankie Paul “Bachelorette” fiasco wound into its second week, one of the lingering questions has been what the scratched season means for the 22 men who paused their lives for the chance to hold Paul’s final rose.
Last Thursday, after ABC made its decision to pull the season, all of the contestants except presumed winner Doug Mason met with producers and attorneys, a source with knowledge of the matter told my colleague Chloe Melas. During the call, the producers reminded the contestants that they are bound by their one-year contracts.
On Saturday, TMZ reported that five of the contestants are considering suing ABC and Warner Bros. Television for their loss of potential income and for creating an unsafe working environment.
Curious about what kind of case the men might have, I reached out to former “Bachelor” producer Michael Carroll, who worked on nine seasons of the dating show.
“The contracts for ‘The Bachelor’ are extensively on the side of the producer,” Carroll told me. “The cast member is signing their life away.”
According to Carroll, the contract specifically says producers are under no obligation to investigate the background, mental health capacity or history of any character on the show. And producers are also under no obligation to air the footage that is captured.
“As viewers, we’re automatically going to think about, ‘Oh, the poor cast’” Carroll said. “Unfortunately for these guys, they did take a lot of time out of their life and they have big expectations about what this will bring them, maybe lots of followers on social media and all the things that come with being part of the Bachelor Nation. I feel bad for them. But it’s just part of the gig. Entertainment’s a rough business.”
“Bachelor” alumna Kelley Flanagan, an attorney who was eliminated in Week 7 of Peter Weber’s season, which aired in 2020, was even firmer about the position the men are in.
“They own you,” Flanagan told Melas over Zoom when discussing her “Bachelor” contract. “So guys going on and saying, ‘Hey, we didn’t get an opportunity.’ They’re not guaranteed to give you that opportunity. I’m sorry, but you just have to suck it up.”
STATES STRIKE BACK
NBC News senior reporter Daniel Arkin has been following the legal pushback to two media megadeals. Here’s his dispatch:
The day Netflix abruptly backed out of the fight for Warner Bros. Discovery, ceding the bidding war to Paramount Skydance, California Attorney General Rob Bonta did not mince words. “Paramount/Warner Bros. is not a done deal,” Bonta posted on X, adding that his office had an “open investigation” into the deal.
Bonta now has company in his antitrust crusade. I confirmed yesterday that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office is also probing the PSKY-WBD tie-up. In an email, a spokesman for Weiser’s office said Colorado is part of a “multistate group” looking into the deal. We don’t yet know which other states are involved.
It’s clear that attorneys general in some Democratic-leaning states are eager to flex their muscles amid the merger mania sweeping the entertainment and media sector. Eight attorneys general, including Bonta and Weiser, recently sued to block TV station owner Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of rival company Tegna after that deal was blessed by the FCC and the Justice Department.
Elsewhere. a group of 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., objected to the Justice Department’s settlement with Live Nation in a federal suit accusing the company of monopolizing the live entertainment industry. The states have vowed to keep the suit going.
ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE
The news that OpenAI is shutting down its Sora video-creation app took Hollywood by surprise this week, including Disney, which abruptly dissolved the $1 billion deal it forged with the Sam Altman-led company in December.
Just keeping up with the dizzying pace of change in AI is a full-time job. For those of us who already have a nine-to-five and are looking for some deeper understanding, filmmakers Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell offer a compelling and slop-free option: their movie, “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” which hits theaters this week.
The film features Roher, who won an Oscar for his 2022 doc about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, interviewing AI titans like Altman, Anthropic’s Daniela and Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
While the captains of industry answer Roher’s big questions about an AI-led future, the storyline relies on a decidedly human idea — Roher’s anxiety about that future while awaiting the birth of his first child.
“What kind of world is my son going to grow up in?” Roher asked when I interviewed him and Tyrell at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “That was the way to frame this gargantuan, scary thing.”
Much of the movie is told through handcrafted illustration and stop-motion animation, all of it rooted in Roher’s own obsessive art-making habit. During our interview, Roher, who has attention-deficit disorder and draws or paints to help him focus, was painting Tyrell and me in a notebook using a small watercolor set. (See the illustration above.)
Roher said he found being in front of the camera for the doc uncomfortable. “I didn’t like the concept of being the Michael Moore of the movie,” he said. “I hate movies that do that.”
But the end result is a film that, well, you couldn’t just generate with a prompt on Sora.
THE HYPE
Why get your recommendations from an algorithm when you could get them from one of TV’s great comedy writers and a millennial reality TV legend/fashion icon.
Michael Patrick King, whose HBO show “The Comeback” is now airing its third season on HBO, is watching “The Pitt” because “it’s thrilling to be introduced to so many new and exciting actors who are ‘killing’ it … and an occasional patient.”
Lauren Conrad of “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” fame, told my colleague Saba Hamedy that she’s been watching FX/Hulu’s “Love Story” “for the fashion.” The millennial icon returns to our TVs with Roku’s “The Reunion: Laguna Beach,” which streams on April 10.
THE DIALOGUE
“It’s not your job to keep them open. It’s our job to make things that make it worth you coming out.”—Actor Ryan Gosling, speaking to moviegoers about theaters during a surprise appearance at a New York theater on the opening night of “Project Hail Mary.”
“I was a liability. I align with Bobby Kennedy, which is aligning with MAGA. … I triple down on it because I’m like, I’m so sick of people telling me who I should be.” —Former Pussycat Doll Jessica Sutta, in a recent interview with “The Maverick Approach” podcast, on why she thinks she was not asked to return for the group’s PCD Forever tour.
“There’s a lot of hate online. There’s a lot of abuse of how I look, and it’s kind of past the point of — you know, ‘Everyone goes through that.’ And everyone does, but it’s made me shy away. It’s made me really go inside myself, not want to attend places, not want to go outside.”—Actor Barry Keoghan, in an interview with SiriusXM’s Hits 1, on navigating fame.
That’s a wrap — see you next week!