Johnny Depp is coming off of one of his biggest hits ever with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and while we hear tell the actor is in talks for a fifth installment, he’s got plenty of other projects charging ahead. Depp is starring in Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows, which is currently filming, he’ll be playing Tonto in Gore Verbinski‘s Lone Ranger opposite Armie Hammer (that one releases on December 21st, 2012), he’s supposedly set to remake The Thin Man with his On Stranger Tides director Rob Marshall, and now we have reports of a bunch of new projects involving the Depp.
The Playlist reports that artist/director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the recent and controversial Miral) has been approached by Depp to helm an adaptation In The Hand of Dante, a book by Nick Tosches. Depp bought the rights to the book a few years ago and approached to avant-garde director to take on the project. Here’s what Schnabel had to say:
“It belongs to Johnny, but I’m not going to make it for a couple of years. We’re gonna work on writing it, developing it. We didn’t sign anything. It’s just something Johnny asked me to read and I think it’s a great book so maybe you should read it. It’s pretty beautiful. It’s about everything.”
The book tells two parallel stories: in 14th century Sicily, Italy, the great poet Dante Alighieri writes his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, his epic poem about a satiric trip through Hell and back and goes on a journey seeking mystical knowledge. In 2001 New York, a Dante expert (a fictionalized version of the author, Nick Tosches) is caught up in a web of underworld danger and deceit when asked to authenticate a possible original Dante manuscript.
Depp was once set to star in Schnabel’s amazing The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, but his pirate movies – and presumably an army of Disney lawyers with pointy teeth – nixed that move. It’s been far too long since we’ve seen Depp as something other than a cartoon character, so despite the fact that Schnabel is apparently not ready to make this yet, Depp’s company Infinitum Nihil has the rights and hopefully we’ll see Depp dive into something more complex (even if the plot sounds weirdly close to Roman Polanski‘s The Ninth Gate, which he starred in).
Infinitum Nihil is also teaming up with Disney for a couple of projects which have the potential see Depp in the starring roles. Deadline reports that Depp and his producing partner Christi Dembrowski have sparked Disney to yet another adaptation of a classic TV series: The Night Stalker. Spun off of a TV movie, the show as a kind of proto-X-Files – it starred Darren McGavin as reporter Carl Kolchak, whose bizarro stories usually found him going head to head with werewolves, vampires, and zombies. I can see a mix of Hunter Thompson and Fox Mulder in this, and it’s right up Depp’s alley. And if you’re wondering, the entire series is streaming on Netflix.
And if all this weren’t enough for you Depp-philes out there, he’s got another project going with Disney: a film about Paul Revere and his legendary midnight ride from Charlestown to Lexington during the Revolutionary War. There’s not much in the way of details about this one, but Batman Forever screenwriters Lee and Janet Batchler are working on the script.
Would you rather see a fifth Pirates movie, a Paul Revere biopic, In The Hand of Dante, or The Night Stalker? Is Johnny Depp getting bored on his private island?