Disney moves ahead with ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ reboot without Johnny Depp, hires writers
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been a cash cow for Disney, so it’s no surprise to hear a reboot is in the works.
Deadline reports the studio is exploring options for an update to the franchise from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writing duo behind both Deadpool films and Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland.
The Curse of the Black Pearl hit theaters in 2003 and the five films, the most recent, Dead Men Tell No Tales, premiered in 2017, earned over $4.5 billion worldwide.
“Jerry Bruckheimer will continue to captain the ship as producer on Pirates of the Caribbean, but at this point it is too early to say who else might be back and that includes Johnny Depp, who has channeled Rolling Stones’ rogue Keith Richards in playing Jack Sparrow through the first five films,” Deadline notes.
Stuart Beattie, one of the writers on the first Pirates of the Caribbean, told London’s DailyMailTV, “I think he’s had a great run. Obviously, he made that character his own and it’s become the thing that he’s most famous for now. It’s been great for him and it’s been great for us. [But] there’s that saying, ‘Don’t frown because it’s over, smile because it happened.’ The fact that they’re rebooting something that you did means that you did something that was worth rebooting. It’s an honor.”
Going back to the begining: Bruckheimer revealed how the project came about in the first place: “The script that Disney had given us originally was a good, straight-ahead pirate movie, which I felt wasn’t unique enough in the marketplace. I thought it would be perceived as another one of the kind of movies they had been making based on their theme park rides, like The Country Bears and Haunted Mansion. We brought in [screenwriters] Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, and they said, ‘What if we make the pirates turn into skeletons in the moonlight and they want to return a treasure rather than steal a treasure?’ I thought that was unique. It was different, it was fresh.”
It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Disney get this moving and land in theaters in a few years, 2022 for example.
