It is no secret to all Michael Jackson fans that Michael always wanted to be involved in movies. ‘The Wiz’, ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’, ‘Free Willy’, ‘Free Willy 2’, ‘Men in Black 2’, ‘Get on the Bus’ are prime examples.
He had multiple plans to get into different movie projects. One of them was to record the theme song for the movie ‘Stand By Me’.
‘Stand By Me’ was released in 1986 as a tale centered on a group of friends trying to solve a murder. Director Rob Reiner casted Corey Feldman, River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell and Wil Wheaton for the main roles of the movie.
In 2010, a special 25th Anniversary DVD was released with commentary from Reiner, Feldman and Wheaton.
Feldman and Reiner talked about the movie theme song at one point which at the time, the title of the movie was not even set.
“Michael called me up before you switched the name to Stand by Me, and he said, ‘I saw a screening of your new film, and they’re asking me to do some music for it.’ And it was for The Body,” Feldman recounted to Reiner. He wanted to know if Michael Jackson was writing an original song for the film.
Reiner then clarified: “They were actually talking to Michael Jackson to sing a new version of ‘Stand by Me’ [by Ben E. King] for the film”
“Even though we all love Michael Jackson, I felt this was all about going back into 1959 and the time. And ‘Stand by Me’ actually came out around 1960 — I think it was — and I wanted to keep with the original song. So the song that we used was the original by Ben E. King, which was number 1 when it first came out 25 years earlier.”
We can only imagine how amazing the song would have been sang by the King of Pop and as far as we could find, Michael did not record the song.
What a pity MJ did not record the song !