How To Save A Fast $90-Million On Your Pirates Movie: Write Johnny Depp Out Of The Thing

The dead weeks of the holidays are the perfect outpost from which to contemplate all manner of upheaval. Not least, since there are so many very lively dead and/or cursed characters in the thing, it's the best possible moment to consider what the heck the billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is going to look like going forward, minus America's and possibly the world's most lovable Keith Richards-manque, the billion-dollar man himself, Johnny Depp. Because the hard-to-imagine is here: nobody's thinking about bringing on Johnny for the next one, at his reported $90-million per. Least of all Disney, who have just brought on the Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to pen the script for the sixth installment and, as described by Disney production czar Sean Bailey, to give the 14-year-old franchise "a kick in the pants."

We might reasonably wonder, who's gonna wear the all the rings and smashed up dangly hair and bracelets and that stiff leather bucket of a hat? Who's going to ignore all manner of deadly peril and still crack wise? Who's gonna give us Keith, but somehow funnier and better than Keith? How can it be matched, that insouciant, dancerly step from the mast of his sinking ship to the dock in the opener lo these many years ago? Who's going to bring all that lovable, railing, vainglorious, almost-ironic shtick? Apparently, nobody. Or, since the thing is just now being written, much less trailered, nobody's been thought of to do that yet.

With the last release back in '15, we can examine the timeline and the bottom line for a few clues as to how this line of producer-think came about. As we know, Dead Men Tell No Tales is the absolute runt of the five-film Pirates litter, coming in as late as it did, plagued with script to-ing and fro-ing, and pulling a franchise-low $172-million domestic gross over a budget of $230-million. Not to worry, the film didn't lose money, pulling a hearty $788-million worldwide.

But, the trouble of getting there: The screenwriter for Dead Men was Jeff Nathanson, who delivered a soldierly, if extravagantly cobbled-together product while being saddled with -- you guessed it -- Johnny himself as a writing partner or very heavily-involved reader, take your pick. There are no bylines on the individual chunks of the Dead Men script, but when a producer is paying an enormously talented actor in the many dozens of millions, say ninety of them, and said actor has been in the role for a dozen years by that point, we can fairly estimate that the scenes involving his character would be some of the more highly wrought, if not overthought, set pieces ever to see the silver screen. If they weren't then just filmed at great cost and then cut.

And in fact, Dead Men was narratively flatter and more attenuated than, say, the ebullient Black Pearl opening installment, which had so many bright, fun things to say about the folly of colonialism and the folly of everything else back in 2003, in the teeth of the second Iraq war. With Dead Men, in 2015, the audience voted with their feet, giving it the lowest opening weekend of the franchise. Nota bene: that still bumped in some $62-million, a figure that would have delighted any number of producers.

Which is not to suggest in any manner or form that Mr. Depp is losing his talent, or his touch, or is entering his twilight years as a star. The last installment made a ton of money. Rather, it's to say that breathing life into a big, multi-billion-dollar franchise five times in a row is an enormously difficult thing to do for all concerned, the writers, the actors, the crew and their producers. Dead Men lost months of momentum as the script drifted in limbo.

One sure way not to have that happen again is to bring in some charmingly nihilstic, very smart writers to write that character, the one who was moonlighting as a screenwriter, out of the film.

And yet. Is that not, also, just a little bit crazy, in the sense of killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Sure, the dude in question has had some personal problems over the last few years, including his marriage, his fire-sale of millions in real estate, and his heavy legal disputes with his former managers, but he's still Johnny Depp, and his last Jack Sparrow outing did rake in the lucre, come hell or high water.

In fact, let's ask the question another way: Is it possible to imagine a boatload, or as in this franchise, several warring boatloads, of 18th-century pirates in the Caribbean Sea without imagining Jack Sparrow, played by Depp, as the scampering skipper of one of them? Depp, the actor, has grown synonymous with the larger narrative. If those narratives are still pulling in north of $700-million globally, as Dead Men did, then defining that as a "problem" that needs some radical fixing is, itself, a much larger problem.

For the moment, the problem of actually generating a Depp-less Pirates rests in the hands of the gentlemen of Deadpool, who have proven that they can dance along that razor's edge between sudden death and glorious triumph, and who can crack wise at the same time. We don't yet know what they will deliver.

But, given the brio and verve of what's gone before, it had better be good.