According to Variety, while out promoting his Christmas Scrooge movie "Ebenezer," Johnny Depp told Entertainment Tonight that he would return for "Pirates of the Caribbean 6" for one reason only: to "send them off on a better note."
"Send them off on a better note" is funeral language. Depp does not say anywhere in the interview that he wants to make a new pirate movie. He says he wants to attend the service. The only involvement he "truly really wants" is at the wake, and the wake is for a franchise that made him a legend five times over.
Jerry Bruckheimer has had six years of quotes ready for this. In 2024: "He's cracked it, he wrote a great, great third act." In 2025: "We want to make it. We just got to get the right screenplay." Now, on the star's own holiday press tour, the screenplay turns out to be exactly "where they need to be." When a movie has been in development hell for six years, the star's Christmas promo tour is the studio's soft feeler.
And Depp is doing all of this in Scrooge drag. A penny-pinching Victorian miser, out in costume, telling a TV camera that the franchise that made him a legend needs "a better note." If you want the story told as a parable, Depp did the research for you.
YOUR TURN: When a star says he'd return to a franchise "to send them off," is that a green light or an autopsy?
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