Johnny Depp didn’t want Pirates 5 to have a female villain

It looks as though ‘Pirates 5’ almost had a female villain…

But Johnny Depp wasn’t too fussed.

An intriguing blog post from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ writer Terry Rossio (via MoviePilot) reveals that his first draft of ‘Pirates 5’ originally had a female villain, but Johnny Depp was dead against it.

And the reason he had is a pretty weird one.

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“My version of ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ was set aside because it featured a female villain,” he revealed. “Johnny Depp was worried that would be redundant to ‘Dark Shadows’, which also featured a female villain.”

Hang on… what?

That seems like a pretty ridiculous reason to can the script, especially when you consider how few people will have seen ‘Dark Shadows’ compared to the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series. And let’s be honest – unless the two female villains were a carbon copy of each other, it’s not likely that audiences will have been put off by another femme fatale in a Johnny Depp movie.

Sketchy logic there, at best.

But Rossio also admits there may have been another reason his script was canned…

“Of course there is also the possibility that all those screenplays simply sucked,” he said. “But 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.”

And this time, it was Johnny Depp’s whim, it seems.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge’ stars Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Geoffrey Rush, and Orlando Bloom.

Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg directed the film based on a script by Jeff Nathanson.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge’ heads to cinemas on 26 May 2017.

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