Has Disney found a million alpacas for Johnny Depp's return to the Pirates of the Caribbean series?

Apparently, Diseny have access to a million alpacas...

During the notorious televised defamation trial against Amber Heard in 2022, Johnny Depp swore that he would not play the beloved character of Captain Jack Sparrow again even if he were offered “$300m and a million alpacas”. The actor was clearly sore that Disney had dropped him from the series following his well-publicised legal issues.

Now, Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, has said that Depp is in talks to return to the hit franchise in a planned sixth instalment.

Bruckheimer told Deadline: “We’re talking with Johnny, we’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done.”

Disney have the doubloons, that much we know, but one million South American camelids... Impressive.

Bruckheimer's recent comments seem to contradict the ones he made in 2022 and 2024, when he confirmed that the Pirates series was going to be rebooted without Depp.

Depp first appeared as the roguish Captain Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003. The swashbuckling adventure, which also featured Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush, was a huge hit and grossed more than $650m at the worldwide box office.

Four sequels followed between 2006 and 2017, with the last entry to date being Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. The series gradually lost its sheen with critics, but continued to gross a lot of money for the House of Mouse. Dead Men Tell No Tales may have been one of the worst reviewed chapters of the series and the lowest grossing of the lot, but it did tally almost $800m worldwide.

In total, the series has made more than $4.5 billion at the global box office.

Depp's legal woes have affected his career. Since 2020, when a libel lawsuit he brought in the UK characterised him as a "wife-beater", the actor has lost out on several roles, including being dropped by Warner Bros. from the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

The jury in the 2022 trial ruled in Depp's favour, finding that Amber Heard had defamed her ex-husband in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she declared herself to be a domestic abuse survivor.

Regardless, roles since then have been sparse, with Depp playing Louis XV in the 2023 French film Jeanne du Barry – in what was supposed to be a comeback role.

Three years later and no major screen roles since, Depp seems to be mounting a Hollywood comeback. He is due to return to the big screen as Ebenezer Scrooge in the film Ebenezer, a Christmas Gothic directed by Ti West, set to be released in November. (Check out the trailer below.)

It's not the only project he is headlining, as he is also starring in the upcoming Day Drinker, the new film by Mark Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man).

Whether audiences welcome him back has yet to be determined. Reactions to his transformation as Scrooge have been largely positive.

However, what we do know is that alpacas mainly need pasture grass, hay or silage for their diets, and will generally chew on just about everything. If Disney and Depp do end up striking a deal for sixth Pirates movie, we hope Captain Jack is ready. A few ruminants sound manageable. A million sound like an almighty handful.