The door’s being kept open for Johnny Depp’s return to Pirates Of The Caribbean, with two different versions of the script reportedly being developed.
When you have a producer like Jerry Bruckheimer backing you up, things are never a lost cause, it seems. When Johnny Depp was fired by Disney after allegations of spousal abuse, he vowed never to work with the studio again. It seemed like his time as the face of The Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise was over.
Indeed, the series itself appeared to be over for a while there, but Jerry Bruckheimer has been actively developing two new films for some time now. One features Margot Robbie in the lead while another is based on a script written by The Last Of Us co-writer, Craig Mazin, who intriguingly labelled the story as ‘weird’.
As Mazin once said, “[We] thought there’s no way they’re buying it, it’s too weird. And they did.”
It seems to be the latter ‘weird’ project which is now being redeveloped in two forms, one without Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow and one featuring the unlikely return of a character who seemed to be frozen out of the franchise for good. Whether Bruckheimer can reconcile both sides remains to be seen, but according to the Variety report, ‘nothing has been ruled out yet’ and in this topsy-turvy world of Hollywood, it wouldn’t surprise us if the version of Pirates with Depp is the one that eventually moves forward.
It seems like Mazin’s script has been rewritten by Young Woman And The Sea's Jeff Nathanson, and we wonder if that’s now the alternate version that reintroduces Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow.
Dead men Tell No Tales (2017) was the last Pirates film to date, earning almost $800m from a reported $230m production budget. Disney is having a pretty good 2024 having leaned into its franchise films with the likes of Inside Out 2 and Moana 2. Playing the hits has worked for the studio, and that’s the reason we’ll likely see another Pirates film grind into gear soon.
Whether it stars Johnny Depp remains to be seen, but it’s beginning to look more likely as the months go on.
