Every guide to the Michael Jackson eras usually stops at Invincible in 2001. But there is a seventh chapter that fans treat as an era even though no studio album ever came out of it — the This Is It period of 2009.
On March 5, 2009, Michael appeared at London's O2 Arena and announced a run of ten concerts, framed publicly as his final live performances in the city. Demand was extraordinary. Within days the run was expanded to fifty dates scheduled between July 2009 and March 2010, with approximately 750,000 tickets sold — a figure that made it, on paper, one of the largest concert residencies ever booked.
Rehearsals ran through the spring and early summer at the Forum in Inglewood and then at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The production design was ambitious even by his standards: a 3D film segment for Thriller, a reworked orchestral arrangement of Earth Song with a bulldozer set piece, and an extended dance breakdown built around a live band rather than backing tracks.
Michael died on June 25, 2009, eighteen days before the first scheduled show. The tour never opened.
What survives is roughly 100 hours of rehearsal footage, originally shot as an internal archive rather than for release. Columbia Pictures assembled it into the documentary This Is It, released in October 2009, which grossed more than 260 million dollars worldwide and became the highest-grossing concert film in history.
The footage is unusual because it was never meant to be seen. There is no stage costume, no audience, and no performance persona. What it shows instead is the working method: Michael counting a band in, asking a keyboard player to let a chord breathe, correcting a tempo by singing it rather than by referring to a click track, and repeatedly apologising to the crew for stopping the run-through.
For fans, that is why the This Is It period functions as a genuine era despite producing no album. It is the only extended documentation of Michael Jackson as a working musician in a rehearsal room rather than as a finished spectacle. Whatever the fiftieth show at the O2 would have looked like, this is the closest anyone will get to seeing how it was going to be built.