Lionsgate’s own motion picture group chair, Adam Fogelson, put a real timeline on “Michael 2” during the studio’s quarterly earnings call, saying production could start “in as few as a few months” or push to early 2027, according to Digital Music News’s coverage of the call. The sequel is targeting a late 2027 or 2028 release.

• Fogelson made the comments during Lionsgate’s earnings call on Thursday, August 6, confirming the sequel is moving from “someday” into active planning.
• The original “Michael” biopic, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson as his uncle, crossed $1 billion at the global box office after its release, making it the highest-grossing music biopic ever, per ComingSoon’s reporting on the earnings call.
• On the call, Fogelson said: “We have a number of sequences, particularly some big musical sequences, that were shot previously, that are almost sure to be incorporated. We are mostly focused right now on how to make sure we can deliver, at the right price, the biggest, best sequel.”
• The first film ended on the note “His Story Continues” after wrapping around the 1987 Bad Tour, a line widely read as a built-in setup for a second installment, per ComingSoon.

What’s notable here isn’t just that a sequel is happening — that was more or less assumed once the first film cleared $1 billion. It’s that Lionsgate is being unusually candid, in a public earnings call, about the mechanics of how “Michael 2” gets made. Fogelson confirmed that footage shot during the original production, including major musical sequences that never made the first film’s final cut, is likely to resurface in the sequel rather than get reshot from scratch.

That detail matters for a project with an unusually complicated production history. The first film’s editing was shaped in part by legal settlement terms tied to the Jackson estate, which affected what could and couldn’t stay in the theatrical cut. Fogelson’s comments suggest some of that shelved material could finally see daylight in the follow-up — meaning “Michael 2” may function partly as a release valve for scenes fans have wondered about since the first film premiered.

Lionsgate’s motion picture segment reported $587.3 million in quarterly revenue on that same call, more than double the same period a year earlier — a quarter that included “Michael’s” theatrical run. That’s the financial backdrop making a fast-tracked sequel an easy greenlight rather than a gamble, and it’s why a routine earnings call turned into the most concrete update “Michael 2” has gotten since the original film wrapped.