Margot Robbie’s female-led Pirates of the Caribbean movie is dead
By Dan Selcke
A couple years ago, we heard about Disney’s attempt to revivify the corpse of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise by getting Academy Award nominee Margot Robbie to front a new installment.
Now, however, that dream is dead, as Robbie just revealed to Vanity Fair. “We had an idea and we were developing it for a while, ages ago, to have more of a female-led — not totally female-led, but just a different kind of story — which we thought would’ve been really cool,” she said. “But I guess they don’t want to do it.”
As recently as May of this year, longtime Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that Robbie’s Pirates movie was still in development. But a lot can change in a few months.
Johnny Depp isn’t slated to return to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise
There’s also another Pirates project in the works, this one written by franchise veteran Ted Elliott and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin. Mazin is now the showrunner on HBO’s The Last of Us. That’s a huge job, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this other Pirates movie was also dead in the water, although we haven’t heard anything specific about that one as of yet.
According to Bruckheimer, neither of these projects would have involved Johnny Depp, whose Captain Jack Sparrow was long at the center of the franchise. That both makes sense, because Depp has been embroiled in controversy over the last few years; and makes no sense, because I don’t know if the Pirates franchise is big enough to escape the shadow of the man who put it on the map.
And really, maybe we should just let it lie. I know Hollywood (and especially Disney) wants franchises that last forever, but there has been exactly one good Pirates of the Caribbean movie — the 2003 original — and it’s all been downhill from there. Surely Disney has a couple other ideas to explore.
Next. How HBO cleaned up the original, messy Game of Thrones pilot. dark
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