Johnny Depp

Man, Johnny Depp is having one PR disaster after another these days. Between lat year’s abuse allegations to this month’s hot goss about his inability to stop himself from spending money, you’d think he’d have run out of messes to get himself into by now. Well, shockingly, you’d be wrong, because news just got out that Depp had rejected an early draft of the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales script because its villain was a woman.

Kenneth Branagh’s big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is no small affair. In fact, the cast of the film is so enormous that Entertainment Weekly had to rotate the cover featuring the cast to landscape to fit everyone in.

Johnny Depp needs some public image rehabilitation, and badly. When it came out last year that he had physically abused former spouse Amber Heard, a dark and sickly pallor was cast over the heretofore beloved actor’s profile. It isn’t helping that he hasn’t been in a good movie since 2011 (Rango, though Verbinski’s follow-up The Lone Ranger has its supporters), and hasn’t been in a really profitable one since 2014’s Into the Woods. The guy has to save a little face if he wants to secure his future in this business, and what better way to do that than to play to the only demographic unaware of his unsavory personal life: the youth!

A certain branch of criticism against the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie back when it came out in 2011 focused on the fact that this was the first one with barely a trace of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, two characters we’d all grown to love through a trilogy of movies, and, arguably, who are the actual heart and soul of the series. Without them, On Stranger Tides felt adrift, unable to find an emotional focus despite introducing a new generation of generically attractive leads. The good news for those of us who have stuck with the series this far is, thanks to the new international trailer, we know Elizabeth is coming back too. Along with a few more of Captain Jack’s “friends.”

It’s been a while now since we’ve seen Orlando Bloom dressed up in pirate gear. The actor didn’t appear in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean, but will make his return as Will Turner in the upcoming Dead Men Tell No Tales. The only thing is, you might not totally recognize him.

There are good celebrity profiles, and then there are the ones that merit their own movies. In 2012, former antivirus software magnate John McAfee took Wired reporter Joshua Davis on a weird, darkly hilarious trip around his Belize compound while he was a person of interest in the Belizean investigation of an American expatriate’s murder. Who else could play him in a movie but certified weirdo Johnny Depp?

Disney The smartest thing that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise ever did was introduce a revolving door of ghost pirate enemies. I don’t really care why Javier Bardem’s character hates Jack Sparrow, nor do I think for a moment that this is the film that will permanently kill Johnny Depp’s character off for good, but those plots points are secondary, the franchise’s equivalent of a ghost McGuffin (a McGhostin?). All I really care about is seeing charismatic actors like Bardem play campy villains.

For many movie fans, international trailers are an afterthought, an attempt to repackage previously released footage for a new market. But given the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies abroad, it’s probably safe to say that Disney takes its international footage pretty seriously. After all, the previous film in the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, grossed a total of $240 million domestically and $804 million internationally. Put another way: the film failed to make back its budget ($250 million) in the United States but tripled it abroad.

There are a lot of ghost pirates in these Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The newest film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, centers on a whole new crew of spectral baddies (led by Javier Bardem) on the hunt for Johnny Depp’s most famous creation, Captain Jack Sparrow. Will he prevail? Well, dull, yes he will. He’s the one whose face is in the actual Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

The people have been making some pretty questionable choices for themselves as of late. Some big politics thing is happening tomorrow, there’s that, and last night marked the 43rd Annual People‘s Choice Awards, the populist awards program that does away with the snooty prestige of the Oscars. The evening delivered some rather eyebrow-raising results in its recognition of the most widely beloved entertainers of the year, and though none quite confounded on a Trumpian level, the night was full of what we’ll diplomatically call “surprises.”