So, it turns out thatJohnny Deppmight have really changedPirates of the Caribbean 5. Possibly not for the better. At the very least, this doesn’t sound very good on paper. Speaking of not sounding good on paper, the change in question has to do with Depp reportedly rejecting the first script forPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talesbecause it featured a female villain. And his reasoning is the real head scratcher.
Veteran screenwriter Terry Rossio recently wrote a very lengthy post on his Wordplayer blog about something he calls “time risk.” Buried in this rather lengthy post is a pretty interesting claim. According to him, Johnny Depp not only rejected his draft ofPirates of the Caribbean 5due to it featuring afemale villain, but because he thought that would be too reminiscent of what he did inDark Shadows. Here’s what Rossio had to say about it.
“My version ofDead Men Tell No Taleswas set aside [just] because it featured a female villain, and Johnny Depp was worried that would be redundant toDark Shadows, which also featured a female villain.”
If this is true, it is more than bizarre. For one, a female villain might have been a nice change for thePirates of the Caribbeanfranchise, since we’re heading into the fifth installment. But really, it is citingDark Shadowsas the reasoning for this rejection that is truly insane. For one,Dark Shadowswas aTim Burton moviethat has nothing to do with thePiratesfranchise. Yes, it has a female villain, but many moviegoers probably don’t even know or remember that becauseDark Shadowswas kind of abomb at the box office. If Depp’s reasoning is that the movie bombed because of the female villain, that would be further misguided, but there is no evidence that suggests he even tried to reason it beyond saying that he did a movie five years ago with a female villain in it.
It is also possible that Terry Rossio’s version of the screenplay forPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talesjust wasn’t very good. But according to him, that isn’t very likely. He seems quite confident that his version. Here’s some more of what he had to say in his blog post, which could be perceived as a bit arrogant, or at the very least, possibly overconfident.
“Usually when I go back to read a screenplay that wasn’t produced, it holds up, often better than the film that was eventually produced. Sometimes it just takes a single decision by a single person, often just a whim, to destroy years of story creation and world-building.”
Terry Rossio’s scriptdidn’t wind up getting used, but he does still have a “story by” credit on IMDB, so some elements of his story are probably still in place inPirates of the Caribbean 5. Instead, Disney, and supposedly Johnny Depp, signed off on Jeff Nathanson’s version of the We’ll soon see how that turned out, becausePirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talescomes out this week.
