The Last Of Us showrunner couldn’t believe Disney bought his way “too weird” Pirates Of The Caribbean 6 script
The next Pirates of the Caribbean sequel promises to be “weird”.
“We pitched it and thought there’s no way they’re buying it, it’s too weird,” Craig Mazin told The Los Angeles Times. “And they did! And then he wrote a fantastic script and the strike happened and everyone’s waiting around.”
Mazin, best known as the co-showrunner of the post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us, co-authored the script with Ted Elliott, the co-writer of the first four Pirates movies.
While we’re big fans of weird, Pirates is still a Disney franchise; short of turning it into an R-rated affair, how weird can things get?
But a more pressing question: will it feature Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow? Will the studio hire him again, given his recent PR woes (including the infamous 2022 libel trial against ex-wife Amber Heard over a Washington Post op-ed where the Aquaman actress claimed she was a domestic abuse victim)?
Depp, on his end, doesn’t seem to care if Disney calls him or not. As far as he was concerned, he was done with Hollywood.
Speaking at the press con for his film Jeanne du Barry — his first since 2020’s Minamata — at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the Edward Scissorhands actor said: “I don’t feel boycotted by Hollywood, because I don’t think about Hollywood.
"It’s a strange, funny time where everybody would love to be able to be themselves, but they can’t. They must fall in line with the person in front of them. If you want to live that life, I wish you the best.”
For a while, there was also talk of a female-led Pirates starring Margot Robbie, but that apparently is off the table.
She told Vanity Fair last year, “We had an idea and we were developing it for a while, ages ago, to have more of a female-led — not totally female-led, but just a different kind of story — which we thought would’ve been really cool. But I guess they don’t want to do it.”
The last Pirates instalment, Dead Men Tell No Tales (or Salazar’s Revenge in some markets), came out in 2017.
Elsewhere, The Last of Us is up for 25 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. The Emmys was originally slated to take place on Sept 18 but was postponed to Jan 15 because of the ongoing writers’ and actors' strikes.
The Last of Us is on HBO Go; the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are available on Disney+
