In his lifetime, Michael Jackson flourished in all mediums – music, films about gay-looking scarecrows.

Really long, slightly tedious music videos. All of them. But what about horrifying, legacy-destroying, drug-addled posthumous 3D tour rehearsal movies? Michael Jackson rules at those, too – Sony will apparently buy the rights to Michael Jackson’s final rehearsal footage, and the High School Musical director will release it before Christmas.

That’s if he can animate the six-foot dancing Plasticine rabbit in time, because a Michael Jackson movie without a Plasticine rabbit is like a Michael Jackson story without a shoehorned-in reference to Jesus Juice – weird and incomplete.

Michael Jackson may have died, but he hasn’t left us. Every time someone breaks free of the shackles of normality and bursts into dance, he’s still with us. Every time someone sings with a passion that defies their slight frame, he’s still with us. Every time someone loads up on a dangerous amount of medical anaesthetic and locks themselves away in their heavily fortified bedroom with an uncomfortable number of children, he’s still with us.

And for those of us without the imagination to remember Michael Jackson that way, there’s always the upcoming Michael Jackson concert rehearsal movie to fall back on. True, from what we’ve seen of it, you’ll be remembering a frail-looking man with an upsettingly disfigured face who halfheartedly paces through a number of dance moves that he clearly has no intention of ever performing in public, but whatever.

And you won’t have long to wait to see it, either – according to reports, Sony is about to buy 80 hours of rehearsal footage from AEG for $50 million, and it’ll be turned into a movie by High School Musical director Kenny Ortega by the end of the year.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – it’s not like one of the last things that Michael Jackson did before he died was record a career-tarnishing new version of the iconic Thriller video in 3D so that audiences could use it to see exactly how much he’d squandered his life on drugs and needless cosmetic surgery procedures. Was it? Was it, Variety?

Sony Pictures is close to a deal to make a feature film on Michael Jackson drawing on the 80 hours of rehearsal footage filmed for concerts Jackson was preparing to perform in London. The film will feature at least three videos, including an alternative version of Jackson’s “Thriller,” which were shot to be interstitial programming during the concerts. The footage was meant to play in 3-D.

Oh.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how else Sony manages to beef up this final Michael Jackson movie. If you ask us, there should definitely be a bit in it where Lando Calrissian tells Whoopi Goldberg what a blast it’d be to dance for Michael Jackson.

What? That’s already been done? Son of a bitch.

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The saddest thing about Michael Jackson’s death wasn’t the messy custody vacuum it left for his kids.

No. And it wasn’t the way that it’s still pretty much impossible to find a radio station that doesn’t only play Michael Jackson records, although that is very sad. The saddest thing about Michael Jackson’s death is that nobody will see what he was planning for his big comeback shows.

But that ends now – we’ve got video footage of Michael Jackson’s last rehearsal right here, and if you like watching middle-aged men walking around a stage very slowly, you’re in for a treat.

Now that the main focus of Michael Jackson’s death is the gargantuan tangle that he left his personal affairs in, it’s a relief to finally be able to shift away an concentrate on something he was actually good at. No, not being sued or dressing up as a lady or being accused of wanton cruelty to giraffes, we’re talking something that Michael Jackson was really good at – performing.

This summer, close to a million people were set to watch Michael Jackson’s glorious comeback at London’s O2. Or, if you want to be realistic about it, probably about 200,000 people were set to watch Michael Jackson’s glorious comeback at London’s O2, with all the others getting refunds when Michael inevitably started cancelling entire swathes of shows for no clear reason. But none of that matters now – he’s dead, so nobody’s going to see anything now.

Except they might. Earlier this week we reported that Concert promoters AEG had taped one of Michael Jackson’s last rehearsals in HD, and was planning to sell it to fans in a heartbreaking Bullseye-style ‘here’s what you could have won’ moment that wasn’t at all about cynically cashing in.

But having read some of the accounts of Michael Jackson’s last few days, that didn’t sound entirely appealing – who’d pay to see a bald, anorexic drug addict with half a face wheeze and shuffle along to watered-down karaoke version of his best-loved songs?

Happily, though, AEG has released a 90-second video of Michael Jackson’s final rehearsal proving that Michael Jackson still had a bit of life left in his tank. Here it is…

Yes, there are a lot of fairly depressing things about the video – such as the fact that Michael Jackson’s most elaborate dance move in the sequence involved sort of marching up and down the stage with his friends, the fact that he’s miming throughout, the fact that Michael Jackson and his choreographers still appear to think that it’s 1986 and the fact that, despite his enviable back catalogue, Michael Jackson was still planning to do They Don’t Care About Us – but at least the final footage of him alive shows him doing something he excelled at, rather than being another gruesome reminder of how rubbish everything else about his life was.

But don’t worry, we’ll get back to that next week. Diana Ross, for crying out loud. What was he thinking?

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