What Is the Budget of This Is It?

This Is It was produced on an estimated budget of approximately $60 million, a figure that reflects not only the cost of assembling and editing months of rehearsal footage but also the substantial licensing fees paid to the Michael Jackson estate for use of his music catalog, image, and archival material. Columbia Pictures and AEG Live jointly produced the film after Jackson's death on June 25, 2009, moving from a planned 50-night residency at London's O2 Arena to a cinematic release of the rehearsal recordings.

The production had originally been set up as the documentary support for Jackson's 'This Is It' concert tour, which was to be the largest of his career. When Jackson died of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication less than three weeks before rehearsals would have concluded, director Kenny Ortega and the production team shifted immediately to assembling a theatrical release. The speed of the turnaround, four months from Jackson's death to wide release on October 28, 2009, was extraordinary for a film of this scope.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Music and Image Licensing: The single largest budget line item. Every Jackson song used in the film, including staged performances of Thriller, Beat It, Earth Song, and Man in the Mirror, required licensing from the Jackson estate and Sony Music. The estate negotiated a licensing deal that was reported to value the archive access in the range of $20 to $30 million, making this the dominant cost driver.
Production and Post-Production: The original rehearsal footage had been shot at the Staples Center in Los Angeles using multiple high-definition camera rigs, intended for archival and tour documentation rather than theatrical release. Repurposing this footage for cinema required extensive color correction, audio mixing, and editorial work to create a coherent narrative from hundreds of hours of rehearsal recordings.
Director Kenny Ortega and Creative Team: Ortega, who had directed the original concerts and had collaborated with Jackson for decades, was the only filmmaker with the relationships and institutional knowledge to assemble the film on a four-month timeline. His fee and the cost of the full creative team that had been working on the concert production were carried over into the film budget.
Visual Effects and Archival Integration: The concert production had incorporated elaborate pre-filmed segments, including a new 3D Thriller sequence with zombie dancers and a film-within-a-film Earth Song segment. Completing and integrating these sequences for the cinematic release required additional visual effects work.
Global Distribution and P&A: Columbia and AEG coordinated a simultaneous worldwide release across 50 countries on October 28, 2009. The marketing campaign, which leaned on Jackson's global name recognition, was estimated at $30 million in prints and advertising, including a premiere in London near the O2 Arena where the concerts would have taken place.

How Does This Is It's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

This Is It occupies a unique position in concert film history. No other music documentary had assembled an archive of this cultural magnitude under this degree of time pressure, and the financial outcome reflected both the singularity of Jackson's legacy and the market's appetite for a final document of his artistry.

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011): Budget ~$13M | Worldwide $98.7M. The direct heir to the 3D pop-star concert film format that This Is It helped redefine. Bieber's film was made for a fraction of the cost and for a fraction of the worldwide audience Jackson commanded.
Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991): Budget ~$4M | Worldwide $29.0M. The most commercially successful music documentary before This Is It. Jackson's film outgrossed it by more than $232 million, illustrating the scale difference between the two artists' theatrical draws.
Rattle and Hum (1988): Budget ~$5M | Worldwide $14.0M. U2's concert documentary from the Joshua Tree tour era was the benchmark for rock concert film ambition. This Is It dwarfed its worldwide gross by $247 million.
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (1988): Budget ~$22M | Limited theatrical release. Jackson's own prior film project showed that his theatrical projects could be expensive and unconventional; This Is It proved they could also be extraordinarily profitable when rooted in genuine performance documentation.

This Is It Box Office Performance

This Is It opened on October 28, 2009, across more than 3,481 theaters in the United States and simultaneously in 50 countries worldwide. The domestic opening weekend generated $23.2 million, remarkable for a concert film with a planned two-week limited engagement. Audience demand extended the run well beyond the originally planned October 29 close date. The domestic total reached $72.1 million. International markets, fueled by Jackson's enormous global following, added $189.1 million, bringing the worldwide total to $261.2 million, the highest-grossing concert film ever released at that time.

Against a production budget of approximately $60 million and an estimated $30 million in P&A, Columbia and AEG's total investment was approximately $90 million. With theaters retaining roughly 50 percent of gross, the studio's share of the worldwide theatrical gross was approximately $130.6 million, covering the full investment and generating a substantial profit in theatrical alone, before home video and digital revenue.

Production Budget: $60,000,000
Estimated P&A: $30,000,000
Total Investment: $90,000,000
Domestic Gross: $72,091,016
Worldwide Gross: $261,237,000
Estimated Studio Share (50%): $130,618,500
ROI (on production budget): approximately 335%

For every dollar invested in production, This Is It returned approximately $4.35 at the worldwide box office. Accounting for P&A, total cost recovery still exceeded investment by more than 45 percent in theatrical alone. The home video release, which followed the theatrical run, added substantially to what became one of the highest-returning music films in cinema history relative to its production investment.

This Is It Production History

The 'This Is It' concert series had been announced in March 2009 as Jackson's return to the stage after a decade-long absence from touring. AEG Live promoted 50 shows at the O2 Arena in London from July 2009 through March 2010. Tickets sold out within hours, with more than 750,000 tickets purchased in less than four hours, breaking records at the venue. Jackson began rehearsals at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in April 2009 under the direction of Kenny Ortega, who had choreographed several of Jackson's earlier tours.

Jackson died on June 25, 2009, at his rented mansion in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. He was 50 years old. The cause of death was determined to be acute propofol intoxication, administered by his personal physician Conrad Murray, who was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Jackson died with rehearsals ongoing and the production in an advanced state of preparation.

Within days of Jackson's death, AEG Live and Columbia Pictures began discussions with the Jackson estate about transforming the rehearsal footage into a theatrical release. Ortega was retained to edit and shape the material, which included performances from rehearsals at the Staples Center shot between April and June 2009. The estate's cooperation was essential: without licensing the music catalog and Jackson's image rights, the footage would have had no commercial path to release.

Post-production ran from July through October 2009, an extraordinarily compressed schedule for a worldwide theatrical release. Ortega and editor Don Brochu worked through the rehearsal recordings, selecting performances that captured the scale and ambition of what the tour would have been. The film was structured to feel like a rehearsal document rather than a polished concert film, preserving Jackson's direction of the musicians and dancers and his commentary on the artistic intent behind each number. The worldwide premiere was held in Los Angeles on October 27, 2009, with simultaneous events in London, Tokyo, and other major markets.

Awards and Recognition

This Is It won the Grammy Award for Best Music Film at the 52nd Grammy Awards ceremony in January 2010, recognizing the film as the definitive musical document of that year. The Grammy acknowledged both the historical significance of the footage and the quality of Ortega's editorial assembly.

The film was also recognized by the American Music Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and various international music film bodies. Its cultural impact extended well beyond award nominations: This Is It was credited with reviving public interest in Jackson's catalog, which saw dramatic increases in streaming and album sales following the film's release. It set a worldwide box office record for concert films that stood for years, and its success directly influenced the production strategy for subsequent artist documentaries.

Critical Reception

This Is It holds an 82% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics broadly praising the film as an intimate and technically impressive record of Jackson's final artistic chapter. The consensus acknowledged that the film benefits from the quality of the underlying material: Jackson at rehearsal is a more revealing subject than many artists at their most prepared performances. Metacritic scored it 63 out of 100, reflecting some critical reservations about the film's hagiographic framing and the absence of substantive engagement with the circumstances of Jackson's death.

Critics frequently highlighted Jackson's visible physical vitality in the rehearsal footage, which contrasted sharply with public speculation in the years before his death about his health. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half out of four stars, calling it 'a splendid music documentary' and noting that Jackson's command of the rehearsal room was that of a consummate professional. The performance sequences, particularly Thriller, Beat It, and Earth Song, were cited as the film's strongest material.

The IMDb user rating of 8.2 out of 10 reflects the film's reception among Jackson's fan base, where it is regarded as essential viewing. Among more general audiences, the film's appeal depended heavily on pre-existing affection for Jackson's work. As a document of one of the most anticipated concert tours never performed, This Is It serves as both an artistic record and a historical artifact of a loss that resonated globally.