The numbers are in. As Michael Jackson‘s “Thriller” jumps from Number 32 to Number 10 following Halloween, the King of Pop has posthumously made chart history.
On Monday, Billboard announced that Jackson became the first artist to reach the Top 10 in six different decades including the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, ‘10s and now ‘20s. “Thriller” released in 1984 in the United States and, at the time, surged to Number Four.
As a solo artist, Jackson first reached the Hot 100’s Top 10 with 1971’s “Got to Be There,” and would go on to achieve 30 Top 10s — including 13 Number One hits — throughout his storied career thanks to blockbuster songs such as “Beat It”, “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” “Man in the Mirror,” and more among his massive catalog. As Billboard highlighted, Jackson last rose to the Top 10 as a feature on Drake’s 2018 track “Don’t Matter to Me.”
Jackson surpassed Andy Williams, who died in 2012, and ranked in the Top 10 across five decades.
News of the Jackson’s return to the Hot 100 arrives after the release of the first trailer for Antoine Fuqua’s biopic, Michael, which featured an oddly upbeat take on the singer’s childhood, despite Jackson himself describing his time in the Jackson 5 as filled with physical abuse by his father and unhappiness.
Although the film wrapped production in May 2024, the Jackson estate reportedly discovered that the completed version violated a decades-old legal agreement with the family of Jordan Chandler, who accused Jackson of molesting him in 1993 when he was 13 and later received a $20 million settlement. Puck reported that the original script focused on Chandler’s case in its third act, breaching the agreement that stipulated Chandler’s story and personhood could not be dramatized in film about Jackson.
The singer, who died in 2009 at the age of 50, was never convicted of any crimes relating to pedophilia allegations, but was prosecuted in 2005.
While the biopic’s release date was initially scheduled for April 2025, extensive reshoots pushed it to October 2025, and subsequently to April 2026.
