“Leaving Neverland” Director Says “Michael” Biopic Is 'Impossible to Take Seriously' as a Depiction of Michael Jackson's Life
“Leaving Neverland” Director Says “Michael” Biopic Is 'Impossible to Take Seriously' as a Depiction of Michael Jackson's Life
Staff AuthorWed, April 29, 2026 at 4:41 PM UTC
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Michael Jackson; Jaafar Jackson in MichaelCredit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns; Glen Wilson/Liongate -
The director behind the documentary Leaving Neverland criticized the new Michael Jackson biopic for ignoring allegations of sexual abuse made against the late pop star in a new interview
Dan Reed's Leaving Neverland covers allegations made against Jackson by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim Jackson sexually abused them as children in the 1990s
Michael, in theaters now, removed scenes that would have featured a separate abuse claim made against him in 1993
The director behind Leaving Neverland, the 2019 HBO documentary about two men's claims that Michael Jackson sexually abused them as children, is speaking out against the new biopic starring Jackson's nephew Jaafar Jackson.
Dan Reed, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, told Variety in an interview published Tuesday, April 28, he watched Michael when it opened in theaters last weekend. The movie follows Jackson's life from childhood in the 1960s through 1988. It's been widely reported that the movie cut major sequences that would have dramatized allegations of child molestation against Jackson, who died at 50 in 2009, that were first made public in 1993, in order to adhere to a settlement made with the family of one of Jackson's alleged victims, Jordan Chandler, back in the '90s.
"The film just flips the truth on its head — black is white, white is black, and two and two make five — and none of the people who go and see the movie will ever question that, but it's a movie that's impossible to take seriously as a counter-narrative to Leaving Neverland," Reed told Variety. "It was supposed to be the retort to Leaving Neverland, and they tried that in an early script and it fell apart, so they created this jukebox movie but haven't managed to create a plausible narrative that would explain Jackson's fondness for children."
Reed's 2019 documentary follows Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two men who knew Jackson as children and claimed that Jackson sexually abused them when they were children. Jackson and his estate have long denied allegations made against the singer; the family even released their own documentary, titled Neverland Firsthand: Investigating the Michael Jackson Documentary, to refute the allegations made in Leaving Neverland.
"Why are they dancing around this?" Reed said, when asked how he feels about the Jackson estate producing movies and a musical (MJ the Musical opened on Broadway in 2022) that ignore the allegations made against him.
Wade Robson, Dan Reed and James Safechuck at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 24, 2019Credit: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP, File
"It's well-known that Jackson spent a long time with small-boy companions, including taking them into his bed at night and locking the door, which is undisputed — and that alone, if someone made a claim, is probably enough to convict him in a court of child sexual abuse — but with Jackson, none of this stuff seems to matter," Reed said. "And neither the estate nor the writer of the film nor anyone else has provided an alternative narrative apart from, oh, he didn't have a childhood, so he needed to spend the night alone with kids, which makes no sense."
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Elsewhere in the interview, Reed described Jackson as "an American myth, in addition to being an actual person," when asked about the movie's popularity at the box office. He also criticized the movie's director Antoine Fuqua for casting doubt on allegations made against Jackson in the past in an interview with The New Yorker, in which Fuqua, 60, said that "sometimes people do some nasty things for some money" in reference to those allegations.
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Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson and KeiLyn Durrel Jones as Bill Bray in 'Michael'.Credit: Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
"Someone who's made tens of millions pushing a false narrative around a man who's a pedophile, that's a nasty thing," Reed said. "Mr. Fuqua has described his own actions while attempting to smear the protagonists of my documentary, and that makes me laugh."
Reed released a follow-up documentary titled Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson in the U.K. in 2025. The movie is available on YouTube, while the original documentary has been taken off HBO's streaming services until 2029 due to an obscure non-disparagement clause contained within a deal the premium cable service made with Jackson in 1992, as Reed told Variety.
Michael is in theaters now.
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