Kevin Mazur/WireImage.comYou know the economy is in peril when no one has a spare $7.8 million to throw down on an unseen Michael Jackson concert film. This past Saturday, an unearthed King of Pop footage from Jackson's 1993 Dangerous tour was put up for auction with an insane "4-5 million pounds" price tag. And not surprisingly, no one bid that much for it. "At this stage it has not sold," a Fame Bureau spokesman told Reuters. "We are still talking to people, but online it did not sell." It didn't help that the brief preview clip Fame Bureau posted on YouTube to attract interest was pulled down because of a copyright claim. First, Michael Jackson's deathbed frame gets withdrawn from auction, then no one bids on this notable item.
As The Amp noted when this auction was announced, it was incredibly unlikely that anyone would make such an astronomical bid for the footage considering there was no way the Jackson estate would ever allow a third-party company to profit from it. Unless someone in the 1% is an extreme Jackson fan, the $6.2 million minimum bid is a lot to spend on a videotape that had no commercial future. Plus, that officially released 'Live in Bucharest: The Dangerous Tour' (only $12 on Amazon!) features footage from the same tour as this unearthed 1993 film.
The auction house was probably hoping that someone from the Jackson estate would swoop in with a nice seven-digit offer to recover this lost film and prevent it from reaching the open market, but that didn't happen. Fame Bureau is still seeking a buyer for the lone copy of this two-hour video, which Jackson gave to his then-driver nearly two decades ago.