‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ producer says reboot, Margot Robbie film look promising

When last we heard of Pirates of the Caribbean, the franchise seemed astray in wayward waters. Barbie and Harley Quinn herself Margot Robbie was going to make a new movie for the beloved Disney brand, but then she said in a 2022 interview that she didn’t think the Mouse House wanted to make it anymore.

Perhaps, however, the franchise isn’t as directionless as once thought. Jerry Bruckheimer, a longtime producer of the Pirates films, offers Entertainment Weekly a promising update on both Robbie’s film and the separate reboot he’s involved with.

“It’s two different movies,” Bruckheimer says. The first is the reboot he’s planning to produce with his Young Woman and the Sea scribe Jeff Nathanson writing the script, and the second is the one from Robbie’s camp that was penned by Christina Hodson from Birds of Prey. “We hope to get ’em both made, and I think Disney agrees they really want to make the Margot one, too,” Bruckheimer says.

Robbie told Vanity Fair in a November 2022 cover story of her treatment, “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, but I guess they don’t want to do it.”

The last film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series was 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which returned Johnny Depp for his fifth movie as rum-guzzling Captain Jack Sparrow alongside franchise favorites Geoffrey Rush (Barbossa), Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), and even Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann). Bruckheimer produced that installment, which was written by Nathanson and co-directed by Joachim Rønning. Bruckheimer would reunite with Nathanson and Rønning on Young Woman and the Sea (in theaters May 31).

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Now the longtime producer and Nathanson are deep into Pirates territory once again. “I think he’s cracked it,” Bruckheimer remarks. “He’s got an amazing third act. We just gotta clean up the first and second and then we’ll get there. But he wrote a great, great third act.”

He confirms this treatment is intended as a reboot and wouldn’t follow familiar characters, but he voices his support for another appearance from Depp.

“It’s a reboot, but if it was up to me, he would be in it,” Bruckheimer says. “I love him. He’s a good friend. He’s an amazing artist and he’s a unique look. He created Captain Jack. That was not on the page, that was him doing a little Pepé Le Pew and Keith Richards. That was his interpretation of Jack Sparrow.”

The actor’s future in the franchise didn’t look so good in the midst of his past legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard, who accused him of domestic violence. He sued his ex for defamation over an op-ed she wrote about being an abuse survivor. A Virginia court ruled in 2022 that both actors defamed each other, but mostly sided with Depp. They ordered Heard to pay Depp $10 million in compensatory damages, and ordered Depp to pay Heard $2 million. Depp has since signaled that he doesn’t need Hollywood to continue his career.

Bruckheimer also confirms to EW that another National Treasure movie is still in development from Ted Elliott, who wrote the first Pirates movie. “These things take time,” Bruckheimer explains. “Your writers sometime really need to dig in and sequester themselves. Ted is a phenomenal writer, but he’s not the fastest. So we wait and wait and wait, but he’s excellent. And you know what? It’s worth the wait. When you have a great writer, it’s gold. When you get something on the page, it looks so easy.”