Orlando Bloom says ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ reboot needs ‘everybody back’

Dead men tell no tales. But apparently dead franchises still might.

Orlando Bloom has been thinking long and hard about what it would take for a return to Pirates of the Caribbean to succeed in a landscape dominated by reboots and revivals. According to the man behind the first, second, third, and fifth films’ dashing hero Will Turner, success in Pirates‘ case hinges on two things.

“Everything is in the writing, right? Everything is on the page, and I think there’s definitely, I’m sure there’s a way to create something,” he told the crowd at the 2025 edition of Fan Expo Chicago on Saturday, attended by Entertainment Weekly. The other must? “I would personally love to see everybody back. I think the way to win on that one is to get everybody back. If they can, and if everybody wanted to go back.”

“To The Edge: A Journey With Orlando Bloom” was one of this year’s main events at Fan Expo Chicago, which also saw Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen pick up their lightsabers once more for an epic Star Wars reunion duel.

A common thread throughout Bloom’s discussion of his work on mega-franchises like The Lord of the Rings was his insistence on good writing being a prerequisite for a good project.

Regarding Pirates, Bloom reflected, “My thing is, if the script was great and — ideally it was everybody — it’d be kind of like in for a penny, in for a pound, you know.” The 48-year-old English actor offered a guess at what Walt Disney Pictures, which owns the rights to the Pirates franchise might be headed with a franchise revival.

“What they’re thinking…is how to do it. Do you bring in a female leading character that replicates Jack in some way? I don’t know. The jury is out on how to do it again, but if [the script] was great,” Bloom said, he would be in.

A few things stand in the way of a full cast reunion on a Pirates of the Caribbean revival, however. Chief among them are the legal battles that have consumed the life of its star, Johnny Depp, over the past decade.

Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard filed for divorce in 2015, a year after the couple were first married, alleging the actor had physically and verbally abused her. Depp denied the claims and eventually sued a British newspaper conglomerate after the tabloid The Sun referred to him as a “wife beater.” That suit was rejected, validating Heard’s account of the relationship, but he won a subsequent defamation trial against Heard when she wrote that she “spoke up against sexual violence” in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed.

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Depp and Bloom’s costar Geoffrey Rush fought and won his own defamation case in 2019. The Australian actor sued The Daily Telegraph and journalist Jonathon Moran for claiming the actor had behaved inappropriately toward Eryn Jean Norvill, his castmate in a 2015-2016 production of King Lear by the Sydney Theatre Company.

Still, original Pirates super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer — who was involved in his own Pirates-related dust-up with Zoe Saldaña in 2022 — believes a Pirates revival reuniting Bloom, Rush, Keira Knightley, and even Depp is possible.

“If he likes the way the part’s written, I think he would do it. It’s all about what’s on the page, as we all know,” Bruckheimer told EW last week, echoing Bloom’s remarks on Saturday. “It’s a reboot, but if it was up to me, he would be in it.”