Following the outcome of his latest court case, industry analysts are forecasting the worst for Johnny Depp‘s career prospects. Having now lost out on Fantastic Beasts as well as Pirates of the Caribbean, the 57 year-old is missing two major sources of income with more legal battles on the horizon against ex-wife Amber Heard.
It may have been his role as Captain Jack Sparrow that rocketed him to the top of the Hollywood A-list and made him the highest-paid actor in the business, but Depp was hardly short of a few pennies before then. As one of the most reliable and acclaimed talents of his generation, he’d been picking up sizeable checks for years, including a $5 million payday for box office dud Nick of Time as far back as 1995.
However, it was the success of Pirates of the Caribbean that launched him into the exclusive eight-figure club and he earned roughly $15-$20 million a piece for starring in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Tourist, The Rum Diary, The Lone Ranger, Transcendence and Mortdecai, and only the first of those was a genuine box office success.
Depp is poised to fall on hard times, though, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones that told us Ben Affleck would be back as Batman in The Flash weeks before it was officially confirmed, and that Disney is developing a live-action Bambi remake, which was correct – that the troubled star is willing to reduce his salary in an effort to score a lucrative role in a big studio franchise project.
Of course, there were reports that longtime friend Robert Downey Jr. wanted to extend an olive branch and recruit Johnny Depp for Sherlock Holmes 3, but that movie now seems to be on on hold and the former Grindelwald will need to get back on his feet sooner rather than later with some more hefty legal costs coming his way in the not too distant future.
