Just over a month after Bryan Singer’s next film, Red Sonja, was delayed indefinitely for reasons that were not immediately made clear, a new report is now claiming that the controversial Bohemian Rhapsody director has been quietly “dropped” from the production.
About halfway through a story detailing a massive scandal involving Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara and actress Charlotte Kirk, The Hollywood Reporter dropped a brief Singer/Red Sonja update:
After Singer was accused in an Atlantic magazine article of sexually assaulting underaged boys, [Avi] Lerner dismissed the story as “agenda-driven fake news,” then walked the statement back. Eventually, he dropped Singer from the project because he was unable to secure a domestic distributor.
In other words, it seems that Lerner, the CEO of Red Sonja‘s film production house Millennium Films, apparently decided to drop Singer from the project once the financial pressures finally became too much. (When its delay was announced in February, a company spokesperson at the time simply explained that the film was “not on the slate at the moment” and was “not for sale at the European Film Market in Berlin.”)
Singer’s attachment to the project was first called into question when the Atlantic published a massive new set of sexual assault and misconduct allegations against the director. Since the story’s initial publication in late January, Lerner and Millenium Films have generally remained in Singer’s corner. Judging by THR‘s new report, however, that no longer seems to be the case.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)