Don’t hold your breath for a Depp comeback
Eighteen billion views. As of Thursday, on the social-media platform TikTok, this is how many videos had been watched under the hashtag ”#justiceforjohnnydepp”. It’s vindication, surely, not just for Depp himself, but the hordes of loyal, vituperative supporters following the actor’s US$10.35 million ($15.79m) victory in his defamation case against ex-wife Amber Heard.
But there’s a problem with those fans: they will be no help to the 58-year-old in rebuilding a viable Hollywood career.
After all, how many views did his most recent film, Minamata (2020), score in comparison? It took US$1.7 million at the global box office, and garnered a sliver of the traction his courtroom antics have over the past few weeks. The post-colonial fable Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) managed less than half of that. Sharing a hashtag, it seems, is easier than buying a ticket at your local cinema. Depp may be the star of his own cause clbre over alleged spousal abuse, but as a movie star he’s long past his prime.
Not that Depp himself agrees. “The best is yet to come and a new chapter has finally begun,” he wrote in his post-victory statement.
Depp, it’s true, has survived many a flop in his day — Nick of Time (1995), The Brave (1997), The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), The Ninth Gate (2000), The Man Who Cried (2000). He and Heard even met on the set of one, Bruce Robinson’s botched 2011 Hunter S Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary. He has spoken openly about not caring when his films lose money.
But big-ticket failures such as 2013’s The Lone Ranger (which lost Disney almost US$200 million) pre-date even his truly problematic era. Only after the first Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003 — a runaway success, from which Depp was nearly fired by Disney execs who were nervous that his take on Captain Jack Sparrow would see the film tank — was he trusted as a commercial force.
Those chiefs became newly anxious about the fifth Pirates film, released in the wake of Depp and Heard’s acrimonious divorce in 2017, which got a big overseas push to make a profit.
Even before the box-office receipts were in, Depp’s behaviour on the set of that film had jeopardised his leading-man status. As his former agent Tracey Jacobs testified during the court case, Depp infuriated the crew by being “consistently” late, throwing tantrums and not knowing his lines, which had to be fed to him through an earpiece.
Hollywood can no doubt stomach many of the lurid details revealed during the trial — the vile “burn her” texts he sent about his former wife, the talk of “cavity searches”, the sliced-off fingertips — but being late costs money.
Depp’s pre-Pirates career had been one of the most interesting in modern film — full of fantastic offbeat work like Cry-Baby (1990), Ed Wood (1994), Dead Man (1995), and a sterling dramatic performance in Donnie Brasco (1997). But he’s been on a headlong losing streak for some time, with only Jack Sparrow and Tim Burton throwing him sporadic lifelines.
The Depp brand may not be too toxic for TikTok, but it is for Disney, who pulled him out of a sixth Pirates movie in 2016 and have shown no signs of wanting him reinstated. Warner Bros followed suit by yanking him away from Fantastic Beasts — even though he was well into his creepy phase as the villain, Grindelwald —and replaced him for the third one with Mads Mikkelsen. After those brutal manoeuvres, it’ll take daunting amounts of repositioning — and no small amount of fan petitions — for studio chiefs to be comfortable rolling the dice on a Depp blockbuster.