Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 Was Headed Towards A Female Villain, Until Johnny Depp Squashed It

In the “silly reasoning” file for the day, it seems that in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the villain was originally going to have been a female character. That would have been great, considering a relative dearth of women characters. In a recent blog post, screenwriter Terry Rossio commented:

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

Now if the reason was that the storyline itself was too close between the films, that *might* have been a reason, however just because the other film had a female villain is about as silly of an excuse as we’ve heard recently. Plus does anyone really remember the 2012 Dark Shadows film, let alone that Eva Green was the big-bad as Angelique Bouchard Collins?

It’s unfortunate because Rossio would have at least been trying going in a slightly different direction. He’s had writing credits on all four of the prior Pirates film, and now this one will be the first one without him (Jeff Nathanson get’s the writing for this one – but I don’t know that he’s been entirely forgiven for his prior work with the story for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

Directed by Espen Sandberg & Joachim Rønning, Pirates also stars Javier Bardem, Kaya Scodelario, Brenton Thwaites, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush and Keira Knightley.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales will land in theaters May 26th.