Two new Pirates of the Caribbean movies are being developed by franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise isn’t sailing into the horizon just yet. Jerry Bruckheimer — who produced the five-film saga based on the classic Disney theme park ride, spanning 2003’s Curse of the Black Pearl through 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales — confirmed in a new interview that there are two new Pirates movies being developed: a reboot penned by Jeff Nathanson (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Lion King remake) and a female-fronted spinoff movie written by Christina Hodson (Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, The Flash) that had Barbie star and producer Margot Robbie attached as lead.
“It’s two different movies,” Bruckheimer told Entertainment Weekly. “We hope to get ’em both made, and I think Disney agrees they really want to make the Margot one, too.” As for Nathanson’s script for the Pirates of the Caribbean reboot, Bruckheimer added, “I think he’s cracked it. 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.”
Though the Nathanson-scripted Dead Men Tell No Tales ended with a post-credits scene teasing the return of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) — the formerly-cursed captain of the Flying Dutchman who met his end in 2007’s At World’s End — the producer said Nathanson’s treatment is intended as a reboot without the saga’s core characters. That includes the seafaring swordsman Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), his wife, Pirate King Elizabeth Turner (Keira Knightley), and the brazenly boozy Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).
“It’s a reboot, but if it was up to me, he would be in it,” Bruckheimer said of Depp. “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.”
Bruckheimer previously confirmed to ComicBook that the sixth Pirates movie would be a reboot rather than a sequel, explaining that a reboot is “easier to put together because you don’t have to wait for certain actors.” Disney has been trying to get the Pirates reboot to set sail since 2018, when the studio hired Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. In 2019, the project changed hands to Craig Mazin (who went on to create HBO’s The Last of Us) and franchise scribe Ted Elliott, who co-wrote the first four Pirates movies with Terry Rossio; Nathanson was then brought on to rework the script that Mazin remarked was “too weird.”
Robbie’s Pirates movie was first reported to be in the works in 2020. But in 2022 — before the live-action Barbie earned $1.4 billion during the Barbenheimer phenomenon last summer — Robbie suggested the spinoff was dead in the water.
“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,” she was quoted saying in a Vanity Fair profile. But to quote the pirate’s song Hoist the Colors: “Never shall we die.”
