Michael Jackson’s estate asked a simple question on Instagram this week: which color collection of his short films is your favorite?
The post came with no new release attached. It still drew 155,230 likes and a total engagement score of 162,515. For a prompt with no product behind it, that kind of response is worth paying attention to.
The staying power goes back to how Jackson thought about the work. He refused to call his music videos “music videos.” He called them short films. The distinction wasn’t just a naming preference. He approached each one as its own production. He hired professional directors, assembled full casts, and developed scripts. The narrative ambitions went far beyond what most artists were attempting.
MTV launched in 1981, and for most acts, the format meant a performance clip or a simple concept video. Jackson pushed the format somewhere else. “Thriller” came out in 1983, directed by John Landis, and ran nearly 14 minutes. It wasn’t promotional material. It was a short horror film with zombies, a love arc, and a Vincent Price monologue. “Bad” came out in 1987 with Martin Scorsese directing its subway confrontation. By then, the expectation for what a Jackson visual could do had shifted completely.
He worked with an acclaimed group of directors: Landis for “Thriller,” Scorsese for “Bad,” and Mark Romanek for “Scream.” The conversations weren’t just about choreography. Jackson had strong opinions about narrative structure. He cared about the visual weight of individual moments. He treated the collaboration like a filmmaker would, not like an artist approving footage.
“Remember the Time” built an elaborate world around a Hollywood cast. “Black or White” ended with a then-groundbreaking morph sequence. “Smooth Criminal” carried its own visual grammar. Each film arrived with its own internal logic, separate from the album it was attached to.
The estate organizing this catalog into color-coded collections extends that same instinct for craft. Rather than releasing everything as a flat archive, the format groups four decades of visual work into distinct chapters, honoring the difference between eras rather than flattening them.
The question also works well. The answer varies by generation. Someone shaped by the Dangerous period sees a different body of work than someone who first found Jackson through the Bad or HIStory era. The color framework makes the catalog question personal.
Jackson died in June 2009. His estate has kept his work in active circulation. The response hasn’t faded much. The short films circulate widely online. Streaming numbers stay consistent.
A question with no product announcement behind it drew more than 155,000 likes. That’s not routine. It reflects an audience that doesn’t need a new release as a reason to engage. Jackson built each short film to stand on its own, not just to move units in a release cycle. The catalog is still proving he was right about that.
Fans can weigh in on the official Michael Jackson Instagram page.