Dan Reed, the director of the documentary Leaving Neverland, watched Antoine Fuqua’s estate-made biopic Michael last weekend and told Variety the film is “icky,” arguing it “pushes a false narrative around a man who’s a pedophile.”
The film, made with the Jackson estate and directed by Fuqua, opened to $219 million in its opening weekend and ends in 1988 — five years before Chandler’s abuse allegations came to light. In Reed’s telling, the movie turns Michael Jackson into “the one true victim,” a harmless Peter Pan figure whose childhood was taken by a domineering father.
Reed singled out the film’s depiction of the adult Jackson, played by his nephew Jaafar. He called Jaafar “he’s a great dancer” but said “his performance is very wooden,” adding that the adult Jackson becomes “this waxwork who performs these jukebox songs.” Reed said the portrait offers “zero insight into what makes Jackson tick” and likened the screened figure to “an asexual plastic action doll of a figure in the film.”
Those choices matter because — Reed argued — the movie treats Jackson’s relationship with children as “completely distorted,” suggesting his engagement with children was “entirely benign and motivated by nothing but philanthropy.” That portrayal, Reed said, flattens the harder, more contested account documented in Leaving Neverland.
Reed’s documentary explores the allegations of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who say Jackson abused them when they were 7 and 10 years old, respectively. Robson and Safechuck described how Jackson convinced them they were in love, gave them expensive gifts, alienated them from their parents, staged a mock wedding between Safechuck and Jackson, and — in the documentary — described alleged sex acts in detail. Leaving Neverland is a four-hour-plus film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City at the Egyptian Theatre in 2019 amid numerous terroristic threats from Jackson loyalists.
The contrast between the two films is stark on its face: Leaving Neverland foregrounds detailed claims and testimony; Michael, made with the estate, stops before later public allegations and accentuates Jackson’s eccentric geniality. Reed’s charge is not simply that the biopic forgives Jackson, but that it actively rewrites how viewers see him — a sanitized life that ends before the public reckoning of the early 1990s.
There is a factual seam the biopic avoids: the film closes in 1988, which places its final frame five years before Jordan Chandler’s abuse accusations became public. Other elements of Jackson’s history that fed controversy — including large payments Jackson made to accusers such as Jordan Chandler and Jason Francia after accusations of child sexual abuse — sit outside the biopic’s timeline and are omitted from its narrative.
That omission is the film’s central tension. Reed’s critique makes plain that Michael’s choice of scope and tone is a storytelling decision with consequences: it gives audiences a polished, estate-approved image and declines to reckon with allegations that Leaving Neverland and others have put at the center of Jackson’s legacy. Reed called the result “icky” because, he said, it intentionally redirects the conversation away from those allegations and toward a myth of victimhood.
The closing fact — and the clearest consequence — is simple. By ending its story before the Chandler allegations and by working with the Jackson estate, Michael reshapes the public record in favor of the subject it celebrates. That will not resolve the competing narratives; instead, it will harden them, ensuring that the debate over Jackson’s life and conduct continues along separate, largely irreconcilable tracks. For Reed, who watched the film last weekend, that outcome is precisely the problem: it “pushes a false narrative around a man who’s a pedophile,” and offers no real answer to the allegations that Leaving Neverland laid out in full.
