Johnny Depp in Talks to Return as Captain Jack Sparrow in Sixth Pirates of the Caribbean
Johnny Depp is in talks to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film, according to producer Jerry Bruckheimer. "We're talking with Johnny, we're working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done," Bruckheimer told Deadline (The Guardian, 17 August 2026).
The news lands nearly a decade after the last entry in the franchise. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, released in 2017, grossed almost $800m worldwide. The series as a whole has taken more than $4.5bn at the global box office since Depp first swaggered onto screens as Sparrow in 2003's The Curse of the Black Pearl, which alone earned over $650m.
Four sequels followed between 2006 and 2017, each built around Depp's kohl-eyed buccaneer. A sixth film has been in development for years, with multiple writers and concepts attached at various points. Bruckheimer separately told Entertainment Weekly that the screenplay is nearing completion and that he believes Depp would return if he likes what he reads.
The path back has not been straightforward. In 2020, a UK court found that The Sun's description of Depp as a "wife-beater" was substantially true, and Depp lost his libel case against the newspaper. Warner Bros asked him to resign from the Fantastic Beasts franchise while a third film was already in production.
Two years later, a US jury in Virginia ruled in Depp's favour in a defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, finding that she had defamed him in a Washington Post editorial in which she wrote that she had "become a public figure representing domestic abuse." During that trial, Depp testified under oath that Disney had dropped him from the Pirates franchise and that he would not play Jack Sparrow again even if offered "$300m and a million alpacas."
Since then, Depp has kept working outside the studio system. He played Louis XV in the 2023 French-language historical drama Jeanne du Barry, which opened the Cannes Film Festival. He voiced a puffin in the 2024 animated feature Johnny Puff: Secret Mission. And this November, he plays Scrooge in Ebenezer, directed by Ti West, with releases set for the UK and US.
No deal is signed. Bruckheimer's language is careful — "talking," "working on," "hopefully." A screenplay near completion is not a greenlit film, and talks can stall over money, scheduling, or creative direction. In Hollywood terms, the project is in development, the stage where most films live or die before a camera ever rolls.
For a franchise that has grossed $4.5bn across five films, Sparrow is the centrepiece — the character audiences associate with the title. Whether Depp's return materialises may come down to the script Bruckheimer mentioned, and whether it meets the standard of a performer who once said no amount of money would bring him back.
