Margot Robbie's female-led Pirates Of The Caribbean film is dead in the water

Dead men tell no tales, and neither do killed movie projects. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case for Babylon’s Margot Robbie and Birds Of Prey writer Christina Hodson’s female-led Pirates Of The Caribbean film, which is now dead in the water at Disney.

Announced back in 2020, the planned feature from the two collaborators was described by The Hollywood Reporter as being not a spinoff, but instead “a wholly original story with new characters under the Pirates moniker,” with Robbie starring in the film.

“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,” said Robbie in a new cover story with Vanity Fair.

This is not to get it confused with the actual spin-off series that Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin and long-time Pirates writer Ted Elliot are reportedly working on for the franchise, steering the action in a new direction, far away from any involvement with former star Johnny Depp.

The last we heard of that project, however, was from Pirates Of The Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer earlier this year, who told The Sunday Times that Disney was “developing two Pirates scripts.” With one of those projects no longer being developed, the status of Mazin and Elliot’s reboot doesn’t look as clear sailing as previously suspected.

The loss of what sounded like a fun, new take on the Pirates franchise feels unfortunately familiar on the heels of Hodson’s Batgirl film being shelved by Warner Bros Discovery, despite being nearly finished. In contrast, the Bumblebee scribe’s next written film The Flash still seems to be a go at the studio, even with star Ezra Miller’s long list of legal issues and headline-making incidents from the past year.