Pirates of the Caribbean Producer Offers Update on Reboot Script: “Let’s Hope Disney Likes It” (Exclusive)

Jerry Bruckheimer has found gold in old franchises. The hit-making producer restarted Sony’s now billion-grossing Bad Boys series, relaunched Paramount’s Top Gun with the $1.49 billion-grossing Top Gun: Maverick, and will next revive Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy at Netflix. But there’s another Bruckheimer brand in need of a reboot: Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, which pillaged and plundered over $4.5 billion at the global box office from its five films released between 2003 and 2017.

It seemed that the seafaring saga sailed off into the horizon with 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, but the series producer recently revealed that two new Pirates movies — both without Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow — are being developed, including a reboot scripted by his Young Woman and the Sea writer Jeff Nathanson.

“We have a script that’s being written right now,” Bruckheimer told ComicBook while promoting Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.  “Hopefully it’ll come in in a month or so, and it’ll be as good as I think it will be. So let’s hope that Disney likes it and they give us an opportunity to make it.”

Bruckheimer previously confirmed Pirates of the Caribbean 6 would be a reboot in an interview with ComicBook, explaining that movie “is easier to put together [than Tom Cruise’s Top Gun 3] because you don’t have to wait for certain actors.” That suggests that the new installment moved forward without longtime star Depp or Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth and Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner — this despite a Dead Men Tell No Tales post-credits scene teasing the return of the once-cursed Davy Jones (Bill Nighy).

Last month, Bruckheimer clarified that there are “two different films” in the works at Disney without Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. (“It’s a reboot,” Bruckheimer told EW, “but if it was up to me, he would be in it.”) Besides the Pirates reboot, Bruckheimer has been developing a female-fronted version with Barbie‘s Margot Robbie attached to star and produce from a script by Birds of Prey and The Flash writer Christina Hodson (who recently jumped ship to Universal’s Fast X – Part 2). 

In 2022, before Barbie became the biggest blockbuster of last year, Robbie suggested her Pirates of the Caribbean movie was dead in the water.

“We had an idea and we were developing it for a while, ages ago, tohave more of a female-led — not totally female-led, but just a differentkind of story — which we thought would’ve been really cool, but I guessthey don’t want to do it,” she told Vanity Fair. 

But now both movies are a possibility, with the Pirates of the Caribbean reboot further along. “We hope to get ’em both made, and I think Disney agrees they really want to make the Margot one, too,” Bruckheimer told EW in May.