Bryan Singer, the director behind Superman Returns and the X Men films, is to have a baby with his best friend after 'years' of planning.
Although they are not romantically involved, Bryan and pal Michelle Clunie plan to co-parent the baby, which is due in early 2015.
The X Men director identifies as bisexual, although he clarified to LGBT magazine Out that 'in the end, it's probably going to be a guy'. "I emotionally lean towards male relationships," he said, adding that he had also dated women in the recent past.
Michelle Clunie, an actress and playwright, has been a close friend of Bryan's for 25 years, according to the director's rep. Both of them are 'over the moon' to be expecting a baby together, he said, while emphasising that Clunie was not acting as a surrogate mother but as a co-parent.
Bryan, who first shot to fame as a director with twisty 1994 thriller The Usual Suspects, has spent most of this year embroiled in legal battle over allegations of sexual assault made by aspiring actor Michael Egan.
Egan accused him and several other prominent behind-the-scenes Hollywood figures of sexually assaulting him at a Hawaiian villa in the late 1990s, but Singer's lawyers submitted evidence that he was not in Hawaii at the time, and Egan subsequently withdrew the lawsuit.
While Bryan is yet to comment personally on this happier development in his personal life, family has clearly been on his mind lately. Last week, he posted a photo to Instagram showing he and his mother, who adopted him as a baby, on the set of the first X Men film back in 1999.
Clunie, who has become something of a gay icon for her role in the US remake of Queer as Folk, tagged the tweet '21stcenturyfamilesrock', as a nod to the unconventional arrangement.