dec 31, 2018 - FORBES How To Save A Fast $90 Million On Your Pirates Movie

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

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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 CEO 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 millions, and said actor has been in the role for a dozen years, we can fairly estimate that the scenes involving his character would be some of the more highly worked, 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 extenuated than, say, the ebullient Black Pearl opening installment, which had so many bright, fun things to say about the folly of colonialism and 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.

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 film 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.

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