Chronicle and
Bright screenwriter Max Landis has been accused of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by eight women in a damning report from
The Daily Beast. It's a lengthy piece, and while you'll find some excerpts below, they make for difficult reading and may not be suitable for everyone.
"[Landis would] bring up his hand and fake that he was going to hit me, and laugh when I flinched," said one woman who used to date the writer. "He'd openly critique my body in front of people and tell me privately that I had the potential to be 'so hot' if I committed to working out more."
"If any of this still feels like a blurred lines scenario let me assure you that he did hold me down and rape me while I said 'no' over and over," she continued. "Afterwards I punched him in the shoulder and I told him, 'When someone says no, you're supposed to stop. What you just did is what they call rape.' He said he thought we were playing a game, and that I liked it. He didn't care."
Another says: "He'd compliment me for not eating. He bought me workout classes to shape me the way he wanted. I lost 15 pounds I couldn't afford to lose while we were together, and even though he'd bring up openly that he'd given an ex-girlfriend an eating disorder I somehow didn't identify what was happening to me as that."
Dani Manning was willing to be named, and recalled one incident in particular. "The first incident that I can remember, we were at some public event and I think I laughed at something and he just started choking me to the point where my eyes were blacking out. I felt such confusion that I tried to leave and I was drunk and I had to just kind of wait while he tried to convince me that he didn’t mean it."
Shockingly, it gets worse, but this should give you an idea of the sort of claims that are being made about Landis. Shortly after this story was published, Chronicle director Josh Trank shared his thoughts on Twitter and while Landis has always talked about the director as if they're still close friends, it sounds like that ended quite some time ago.
Landis is currently writing a remake of American Werewolf in London, but we can now likely expect that and any other projects he has in the works to be put on hold for the foreseeable future.