Over the last two weeks, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's defamation trial has seen details from their volatile marriage come to the light.
The warring celebrity exes are currently embroiled in a lawsuit, with Depp suing Heard for $50 million over a Washington Post op-ed she wrote in 2018 where she claimed to be a domestic abuse survivor. Heard, meanwhile, is counter-suing her former husband for $100 million, maintaining that he assaulted her on several occasions.
But as well as the gory details of the actors' relationship, their trial has also caused information about Depp's sixth and unmade Pirates of the Caribbean movie to float to the surface.
The sixth installment of the beloved Disney franchise stalled in pre-production when Heard's op-ed was published and Depp was sacked from the project, despite having played the series' main character Captain Jack Sparrow in all five Pirates films.
Ever since, fans have clamored for the studio to release new details about the unmade Pirates movie - and hoped that, despite Depp's legal difficulties, the franchise might still sail again.
During his testimony last week, Depp let the cat out of the bag and spilled some huge secrets about what went on behind the scenes of the sixth movie.
So, what have we found out so far about the ill-fated final installment in the swashbuckling franchise?
After the release of the fifth Pirates film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, in 2017, Depp revealed that he was brought on board to help write the sixth movie.
On the witness stand, he explained that he "had quite different ideas about the character [of Jack Sparrow" from the start, and that his notes on the beloved pirate "brought that character to life."
Jack Sparrow "was a character that I had built from the ground up and was something that I put a lot of myself [into]," Depp testified.
However, six days after Heard's op-ed was published in 2018, the actor claims that Disney cut ties with him. According to Depp, this left the project in "dangle mode".
"Having added much of myself, much of my own rewriting, the dialogue, the scenes, the jokes, I didn't quite understand how after that long relationship and quite a successful relationship with Disney that… suddenly I was guilty until proven innocent," he told the court.
However, he also said that he was unsurprised that the studio dropped him. "Two years had gone by of constant worldwide talk about me being this wife-beater. So I'm sure that Disney was trying to cut ties to be safe. The #MeToo movement was in full swing at that point," he said.
Disney hasn't erased the character of Jack Sparrow completely: as Depp noted: "They didn't remove my character from the rides. They didn't stop selling dolls of Captain Jack Sparrow. They didn't stop selling anything. They just didn't want there to be something trailing behind me that they'd find."
As for whether the sixth film will ever be made, it looks unlikely that Depp will be in it. The actor expressed his sadness at not being able to give a "proper goodbye" to the characters, saying: "My feeling was that these characters should be able to have their proper goodbye," adding: "I thought that the characters deserved to have their way out of… to end the franchise on a very good note. And I planned on continuing until it was time to stop."
But despite his attachment to the characters, Depp was adamant that even if Disney offered him "$300 million and a million alpacas," there was nothing on earth that could convince him to work with the studio again on the franchise.
While there won't be a sixth Pirates film featuring Depp as Jack Sparrow, there might still be another movie in the franchise. Entertainment Weekly reports that Birds of Prey writer Christina Hodson was tapped to bring a new, female-oriented Pirates movie starring Margot Robbie to the big screen. How closely it will be connected to the previous series remains to be seen.
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