Highlights
- Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed at D23 that talks are underway for Johnny Depp to return in Pirates 6.
- Depp answered “That’d be fun” when asked about reprising Captain Jack Sparrow at a 2025 movie premiere.
- The franchise has grossed $4.5 billion, but 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales was its lowest earner yet.
Captain Jack Sparrow has been marooned for nearly a decade. This weekend, someone finally rowed out to the island.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Deadline at D23 that “we’re talking with Johnny Depp, we’re working on a screenplay” — the closest thing to a confirmation Disney has allowed since 2018.
He’s been rattling this cage for a while. Last year he told Entertainment Weekly, “If he likes the way the part’s written,” Depp would likely say yes, because with this man it was always about the page.
In March, at the Producers Guild Awards, Bruckheimer swatted down rumors of a Depp-less voyage: “if it’s up to me, he’ll be in it.”
Depp’s own answer was characteristically economical. Asked at the Beverly Hills premiere of Modì about another Pirates, he offered three words: “That’d be fun.”
Which is a long way from where he was. Testifying about a 2018 report that he was out as Sparrow, Depp said, “I’m sure that Disney was trying to cut ties to be safe.”He also told the courtroom that not even $300 million and a million alpacas would tempt him back.
Alpaca futures are, apparently, negotiable.
The rehabilitation tour is already sailing. He crashed Comic-Con in Scrooge prosthetics for Ebenezer, and the trailer opened with a line doing double duty: “It’s good to be back.”
Not that he’ll admit he left. “I’ve had about 17 comebacks, and I don’t understand it,” he told the LA Times in 2023, insisting he never went anywhere.
The math is doing its own persuading. The franchise has minted $4.5 billion, but 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales limped to a franchise-low $795.9 million.
Deadline’s sources say the next chapter centers on Margot Robbie‘s protagonist, with Sparrow demoted to a side character—the eyeliner as garnish, not entrée.
Disney didn’t comment. Of course it didn’t. That ship sails only when the tracking numbers say so.
