Do we like Bryan Singer?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Never charged and he denies it all, but a settled suit and years of alleged misconduct with young people outweigh one donation, and we found nothing else good.
Bryan Singer is a USC film-school alumnus who went from indie breakout to the director behind the X-Men films, and for a while he was one of the most bankable names in Hollywood. Then the ground gave way. His recent career has been about as quiet as a blockbuster director's can get, and he now works outside the studio system.
The big one is the January 2019 Atlantic investigation, which reported allegations from four men that Singer had sexual contact with them when they were teenagers or younger. Singer, through his lawyer, categorically denied ever having sex with, or a preference for, underage men. He called the story “vendetta journalism” and pointed out that Esquire had declined to run a similar piece.
The court record is messier than a clean slate and less damning than a verdict. A 2014 suit in Hawaii from a former model alleging abuse as a teen was dropped by the plaintiff after his lawyers withdrew, and Singer had called it a “sick, twisted shakedown”. A 2017 lawsuit alleged he sexually assaulted a 17-year-old at a 2003 yacht party, which Singer denied. In 2019 he agreed to pay $150,000 to a bankruptcy trustee to end it, and his lawyer called that a purely business decision. The trustee's filing noted no evidence had been produced that he attended the party.
Then there's the set gossip. The Hollywood Reporter reported in 2020 that X2's cast confronted him in his trailer and threatened to walk after a stunt went wrong and a producer tried to halt filming; a representative said “nothing like that ever happened”. In 2021 Variety ran a first-person account from a former assistant alleging a controlling relationship, and Singer's lawyer denied it in a four-page letter. All of this is alleged, and none of it has been tested in a criminal court.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no words about trans people, women, migrants or the climate, no donations to causes, no conspiracy rabbit holes. His recent film Monument, a drama about Israel's presence in Lebanon starring Jon Voight and Joe Mazzello, opened in limited release in March 2026. Variety reported he moved to Israel and shot it in Greece in 2023, and that sources expected it to be polarising. That's one project, not a pattern.
The professional fallout was heavy. Fox fired him from Bohemian Rhapsody in 2017, he was dropped by his agency, and Millennium Films parted ways with him on Red Sonja when no domestic distributor would touch it with him attached, per Variety. He still got the directing credit on Bohemian Rhapsody because of a Directors Guild ruling, but he has been shut out of the big-studio world since.