UPDATE: Variety reports Netflix is not co-financing La Favorite as a Netflix original. The streamer has licensed the Depp movie to stream on Netflix France after a 15-month theatrical window in the country. The original story follows below.
Netflix will reportedly co-finance and stream Johnny Depp’s first movie since the actor’s highly-publicized defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard. The Stranger Things streamer will help produce La Favorite, a French period drama starring Depp as King Louis XV, Bloomberg reports. Mon Roi and DNA filmmaker Maiwenn Le Besco will direct La Favorite for Why Not Productions, the French production company behind The Purge and the Mel Gibson-starring crime drama Blood Father. According to Bloomberg, Depp’s La Favorite is expected to be released in 2023 in French theaters before streaming on Netflix France after 15 months. It’s unclear if the movie will be available globally on Netflix.
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La Favorite will be Depp’s first movie since his role as photojournalist Eugene Smith in the 2020 movie Minamata, which was filmed in 2019 but only released in the United States earlier this year. La Favorite, which will film in and around Paris this summer, is Depp’s first time acting in French opposite Le Besco as Madame du Barry, according to Bloomberg.
Depp sued Heard for defamation over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which the Aquaman star — without mentioning Depp by name — detailed her experience as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” On June 1, a jury decided Depp v. Heard in Depp’s favor, awarding the Pirates of the Caribbean star $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages (since reduced to Virginia’s statutory cap of $350,000). The jury also decided a $2 million judgment against Depp on a single count of defamation.
In an August 2021 interview with The Sunday Times, Depp addressed what he called “Hollywood’s boycott of me” after losing a libel case against The Sun over the tabloid’s depiction of him as a “wife-beater” who had assaulted Heard. Depp’s comments came months after his late 2020 exit from Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter spinoff series Fantastic Beasts, where he portrayed the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
In recent weeks, representatives for Depp debunked “made up” rumors Disney was willing to pay the Pirates star $301 million to return to the franchise in his iconic role as Captain Jack Sparrow. Since his final appearances as Sparrow in 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and as Grindelwald in 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Depp appeared in such smaller films as The Professor (2018), City of Lies (2018), and Waiting for the Barbarians (2019).
