Johnny Depp’s reported reason for returning as Jack Sparrow gives the Pirates of the Caribbean conversation a useful creative focus. According to Variety, Depp would consider returning for a sixth film to offer a better farewell: “I want to send them off on a better note.” That expresses a reason to return; it does not, by itself, establish a signed deal, a finished film, or a release date.
The interesting question is what a better note would sound like. For my money, the answer begins with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The original film understands something a farewell would need to preserve: Jack is entertaining because other people cannot quite decide whether he is brilliant, ridiculous, trustworthy, or dangerous.
Spoiler warning: The following retrospective discusses the original film’s characters, ending, and post-credits scene. Suggestions for a sixth film are critical judgments, not reported story details.
Jack Sparrow works because his foolishness has a purpose
Depp’s performance creates a productive gap between appearance and intention. Jack’s wandering attention, loose posture, and elaborate verbal evasions make him seem unreliable. Yet watching him closely becomes part of the pleasure: is he losing control, or encouraging someone else to believe that he has?
That uncertainty gives the action a comic rhythm. His confrontation with Will Turner in the blacksmith’s workshop is more than an opportunity to demonstrate swordplay. Will approaches the encounter with seriousness and discipline; Jack treats its surroundings and rules as things he might exploit. Their different attitudes make the scene feel like an argument conducted through movement.
Jack’s advice, “If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it,” captures this practical intelligence. He notices opportunities other people miss while they are busy behaving correctly.
My strongest reservation about a farewell built around celebrating Jack is that celebration could remove this tension. If every entrance announces a legend and every companion admires him, the audience loses the pleasure of discovering his competence. A satisfying return would allow him to look foolish, make mistakes, and earn his escape.
Will and Elizabeth make Jack’s world larger
The original film gives Jack a clear objective: reclaim the Black Pearl. Will’s desire to rescue Elizabeth intersects with that objective without becoming identical to it. Their alliance therefore has friction. They can help each other while disagreeing about motives, methods, and what kind of person deserves trust.
Through Will’s perspective, Jack becomes a challenge to a tidy moral education. Respectability and decency do not always coincide. A pirate can perform a generous act; a socially approved course of action can demand an ugly compromise. Jack need not become a conventional mentor for that lesson to register.
Elizabeth is equally important because she refuses to remain an object of competing plans. On the island, she burns the rum to create a rescue signal. Jack sees the destruction of a resource he values; Elizabeth sees a way out. The comedy belongs to their incompatible priorities, and she gets the decisive action.
A future film would benefit from that same independence, whatever its cast. Supporting characters need desires that inconvenience Jack. Our discussion of creative ownership and self-respect in I Play Rocky considers a related dramatic principle: a protagonist becomes compelling when a personal demand creates a real conflict.
Barbossa gives the adventure something more unsettling than danger
Barbossa’s curse supplies the original film with its strongest contradiction. His crew possess treasure but cannot enjoy ordinary bodily pleasures. Their apparent advantage—an existence beyond normal mortality—has become imprisonment.
Geoffrey Rush makes Barbossa theatrical without draining that predicament of bitterness. The performance can expand into swagger and menace, then narrow around the longing for something as simple as eating an apple. That appetite makes the supernatural premise emotionally legible. The treasure is impressive; the inability to enjoy life is horrifying.
This is where the film’s adventure machinery acquires meaning. Jack wants his ship back, but Barbossa demonstrates how possessing something can fail to satisfy the need behind the pursuit. A sixth film would not need another curse to recover that depth. It would need an antagonist whose desires reveal something uncomfortable about Jack’s own.
The Black Pearl represents a way of living
Jack’s explanation that “What the Black Pearl really is … is freedom” supplies the emotional center beneath his evasions. A ship gives him movement, self-direction, and the possibility of refusing the place other people assign him.
That makes his attachment more revealing than simple greed. The Pearl is valuable because of the life it permits. His other observation, “Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate,” belongs to the same system of values: desire cannot always be measured by what someone owns.
There is also a contradiction worth preserving. Jack’s freedom often depends on bargaining, manipulating, or imposing on other people. He cannot simply declare himself independent and escape every obligation. That gap between his ideal and his behavior gives a writer something richer than another hunt for a magical object.
For a farewell, I would want the story to ask what freedom means when keeping it requires a sacrifice. Jack could remain funny, evasive, and self-interested while confronting a choice he cannot talk his way around.
What would make a sixth film a satisfying farewell?
Depp’s reported wish establishes an aspiration, not a creative blueprint. Judged against the original film, three priorities would give that aspiration substance:
- Give Jack a specific desire. The audience should understand what he wants and why obtaining it matters to him now.
- Let other characters change the outcome. A farewell becomes dramatically thin when everyone exists to congratulate its central figure.
- Make the ending resolve a choice. A familiar costume, a musical swell, or a departing ship can support closure, but none can substitute for it.
Resolution does not necessarily require Jack’s death, retirement, or transformation into a solemn hero. Those are possible devices, not measures of emotional seriousness. A final act can feel complete because someone has finally chosen what they value.
As our analysis of the unresolved escape at the end of The Graduate explores, getting away and finding an answer are different dramatic achievements. Jack’s departure would need a meaning beyond successful escape.
The deeper lesson: freedom matters because life is finite
Viewed through its central characters, The Curse of the Black Pearl contrasts different forms of confinement. Will struggles with inherited assumptions. Elizabeth pushes against a prescribed future. Barbossa has acquired an existence stripped of pleasure. Jack wants the means to keep moving.
My reading is that the film makes adventure valuable through these limitations. Movement means something when a person might be trapped; pleasure means something when it can be lost. A better farewell for Jack would honor that vulnerability while retaining his appetite for the next horizon. The character does not need to explain his entire life. He needs one consequential decision that makes us understand it differently.
A post-credits detail worth revisiting
The original film’s post-credits scene shows Barbossa’s monkey taking another piece of cursed gold and becoming undead again. It is a compact final joke about temptation surviving apparent resolution. For anyone imagining Jack’s farewell, the distinction matters: a story can finish its emotional business while leaving its mischievous world alive.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: November 2, 2026 at 17:58:27 PST (Los Angeles time)
