'Leaving Neverland' Director Says Michael Jackson Biopic Is 'Impossible to Take Seriously'
Dan Reed, the director behind the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, is not holding back his thoughts on the Michael Jackson biopic Michael.
Leaving Neverland detailed the sexual abuse claims against Jackson made by James Safechuck and Wade Robson. Reed spoke to Variety on Tuesday, April 28 about the recently released biopic starring Jackson's nephew Jaafar Jackson. The biopic notably ends in 1988, five years before the first sexual abuse allegation was made against Jackson, in adherence to a settlement made with the family of alleged victim Jordan Chandler.
"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 said in the interview with 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."
Jackson and his estate have denied all allegations of sexual abuse against the singer. Jackson's family even released their own documentary Neverland Firsthand: Investigating the Michael Jackson Documentary to refute the allegations made by Safechuck and Robson.
"Why are they dancing around this?" Reed said of the Jackson family's response to the allegations made against him.
Reed continued, "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. 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."
Reed also criticized Michael's director Antoine Fuqua for previous comments made in The New Yorker about the sexual abuse allegations where he remarked "sometimes people do some nasty things for money."
"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 of Fuqua's previous remarks. "Mr. Fuqua has described his own actions while attempting to smear the protagonists of my documentary, and that makes me laugh."
A follow up documentary titled Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson was released by Reed in the U.K. in 2025. The follow up documentary is available on YouTube whereas the original documentary will be off of HBO's services until 2029. According to Reed, this is due to a non-disparagement clause contained within a deal HBO made with Jackson in 1992.
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This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 11:46 AM.