Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed at D23 that Disney is talking with Johnny Depp about Pirates of the Caribbean 6.
“We’re talking with Johnny, we’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done,” Bruckheimer told Deadline.
Sounds like Captain Jack Sparrow is finally coming home.
Except that’s apparently not the movie Disney is making.
Per Deadline’s sources, the actual plan is a Margot Robbie movie, with Jack Sparrow as a side character.
Disney gets Depp’s name on the poster. Depp gets to watch someone else steer the ship. And fans who have already watched Disney run versions of this play with Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Marvel, and Doctor Who are done pretending it’s a fresh idea.
What Bruckheimer Said — And What Deadline Is Reporting
First, the on-the-record part.
Bruckheimer said: “We’re talking with Johnny, we’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done.”
Then comes Deadline’s sourcing.
Separate from Bruckheimer’s comments, Deadline reports the next movie won’t be another Jack Sparrow story.
Instead, it’s built around Robbie’s protagonist, with Sparrow as a side character. The trade describes the movie as an evolution of the franchise.
Bruckheimer didn’t reveal story specifics himself, so the Robbie-first structure comes from Deadline’s sources, not the producer.
But it lines up with everything Disney has been doing with this project since 2020.
Disney Already Tried To Make This Movie
Disney announced a female-led Pirates movie starring Robbie and written by Birds of Prey and The Flash writer Christina Hodson back in June 2020, two years after dropping Depp from the franchise.
The reaction was immediate.
Fans said no Depp, no ticket, and the petition to bring him back as Captain Jack piled up hundreds of thousands of signatures.
By 2022, Bruckheimer was telling The Sunday Times that two scripts were in development, including one with Robbie. Asked whether Sparrow would return, his answer was “not at this point.”
Then Depp won his defamation case, and by that November, Robbie was telling Vanity Fair her version was dead: “I guess they don’t want to do it.”
Then the ground shifted.
Depp’s comeback got real, while Disney’s biggest franchises started bleeding the audience that built them.
Last August, Bruckheimer said Depp would come back “if he likes the way the part’s written.”
That same month, Variety reported Disney executives were pushing creatives to win back young men after Marvel and Lucasfilm shed them, with insiders pointing to “guy-leaning” fare such as Pirates of the Caribbean as the kind of thing the studio wanted more of.
Two months later, Bruckheimer said “she’s still involved” about Robbie, and we wrote at the time that it looked like Disney had combined the two scripts to keep her on board.
In February, he shot down the Jack Sparrow’s son rumor and called it “two different movies.”
Deadline’s new report reads like the answer: one movie, hers, with Depp brought back inside it.
So the movie Disney wanted to make in 2020 — the one fans rejected — appears to be the movie Disney is making in 2026.
The difference is that this time, Depp is apparently on the poster.
Fans Have Seen This Disney Playbook Before
The play is familiar.
Bring back the character audiences actually paid to see, push him to the edge of the story, hand the movie to the new lead the studio picked, and keep the old name around for the marketing.
Disney has done versions of it over and over, and the results are already on the board.
Star Wars. Luke Skywalker came back in The Last Jedi as a hermit who tossed his lightsaber over his shoulder so Rey could have the trilogy. Sequel trilogy grosses went from $2.07 billion to $1.33 billion to $1.07 billion, and Star Wars didn’t release another movie for seven years. When it finally returned, The Mandalorian & Grogu grossed a franchise low, and early projections for Star Wars: Starfighter will be even lower. Rey’s own solo movie has been in development since 2023, has burned through writers, was pulled off Disney’s release calendar, and still has no script anyone will vouch for.
Indiana Jones. Dial of Destiny spent roughly $300 million to hand Harrison Ford’s Indy to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s goddaughter and made $384 million worldwide. Indy came back at D23 this weekend, as a theme park ride.
Marvel. The Marvels is still the lowest-grossing MCU movie ever at $206 million. Iron Man got replaced by Ironheart, Hulk got a She-Hulk sitcom, and fans hung the “M-She-U” label on the whole era. Disney’s own executives, per Variety, eventually admitted the studio had driven off the young men who helped build the brand. The reflex is so ingrained that fans looked at Marvel’s X-Men cast reveal on Friday and asked “where are the men?” before the panel was over.
Doctor Who. The BBC swapped the Doctor for Jodie Whittaker and the ratings slid. Disney arrived with Ncuti Gatwa and a budget of roughly $13 million an episode, the ratings kept sliding, and Disney walked after two seasons. A former Disney exec told Deadline it was apparent early on the deal wasn’t for the long term. The show has been off the air for 19 months, and it may be years before it returns.
Every one of those came with some version of the same pitch: an evolution of the franchise.
Now Deadline is using that phrase for Pirates 6.
Fans know what it means.
Jack Sparrow Built This Franchise
Five Pirates movies. $4.5 billion worldwide. Every one of them with Depp front and center.
The franchise “low,” 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, still made $795.9 million.
Bruckheimer himself has said Depp created Captain Jack, that the character wasn’t on the page and came from Depp doing “a little Pepé Le Pew and Keith Richards.”
Now Disney’s apparent plan is to put the man who invented the character in the passenger seat of his own franchise.
Nobody is arguing Robbie can’t open a movie. Barbie made $1.4 billion.
It’s worth noting she has not actually signed on. Puck’s Matthew Belloni reports Robbie has passed on three or four scripts since being attached in 2020.
The objection is the trick: use Depp to sell tickets to a movie Disney already tried to sell without him and couldn’t.
Fans don’t want Jack Sparrow as a legacy cameo. They want the movie they’ve been asking for since 2018, and Disney has spent eight years and two dropped scripts avoiding it.
Depp doesn’t need this, either.
He agreed on the stand in 2022 that not even $300 million and a million alpacas would bring him back, and his comeback is already happening at other studios.
He headlines Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol for Paramount on November 13, his first major studio lead since 2018, and he took over San Diego Comic-Con last month in full Scrooge costume without a panel, a trailer, or a Q&A. Lionsgate’s Day Drinker follows in March 2027.
Disney needs Depp far more than Depp needs Disney, which makes “side character” exactly backwards.
Bruckheimer says the screenplay is still being written.
That means the balance between Robbie’s captain and Depp’s is still on the page. Disney still has a chance to make the Pirates movie its audience has been asking for instead of trying once again to sell them the one it already rejected.
Update: Depp’s Test Scores Land, And Robbie Still Hasn’t Signed
Puck’s Matthew Belloni has since reported the first test screening numbers for Ebenezer, and they land squarely on this story.
Depp scored an 86 with the test audience, against a norm of 67 for a lead. Women over 35 rated the movie higher than any other demo, with Depp hitting 90 percent with them.
Belloni also reports Disney film chiefs Alan Bergman and David Greenbaum want Depp for Pirates 6, and that Robbie has still not committed after three or four script iterations dating back to 2020. 1917 writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns is now writing the version meant to satisfy her while leaving room for Jack Sparrow in support.
Six years, four scripts, and the lead Disney picked still has not said yes, while the star it dropped just posted numbers most working actors never see. Our full breakdown of the Ebenezer test screening scores is here.
Bruckheimer Also Weighs In On Paramount
Deadline also asked the Top Gun producer about David Ellison’s plan to move Paramount out of California if the state’s antitrust case against the Warner Bros. Discovery merger isn’t settled.
Bruckheimer wants the studio to stay.
“Look, we want to keep ’em here. It’s unfortunate that it’s got this kind of political circle around it, which is a shame, and hopefully they work it all out, they stay here, and the business gets healthier.”
Pirates of the Caribbean 6 does not have a release date.
