Not to try and join together dots that may or may not even be there, but it’s nonetheless curious that Johnny Depp is returning to the discipline that brought him one of his greatest failures as one of his first acts after being excommunicated from mainstream Hollywood.

Less than a decade ago, he was the single highest-paid star in the business after Pirates of the Caribbean turned out to be the financial gift that kept on giving, but his recent output has been decidedly smaller in scale and plagued by the sort of difficulties that would never be associated with the well-oiled Disney machine.

 

Depp was booted from not only his signature franchise but the Fantastic Beasts series. The biographical crime thriller City of Lies began shooting in December 2016 but didn’t secure a release until March 2021. Minamata kicked off principal photography in January 2019 but didn’t premiere until February 2022 and faced plenty of issues between those two points, while his next feature-length outing will see him voice an anthropomorphised puffin in the spinoff from a Serbian animated TV series.

These are not halcyon days for Depp, to put it lightly, and while everybody is fully aware of the reasons why the bond between himself and American cinema has been so irrevocably severed, the decision to take charge of his own destiny finds him running the risk of experiencing the exact same misfortune twice.

Upcoming biographical drama Modì finds Depp returning to the director’s chair for the first time in three decades, with Al Pacino starring as painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani. He won’t be appearing in front of the camera this time around, though, but he’ll be keeping his fingers crossed that it doesn’t suffer the miserable fate of his debut, The Brave.

Co-written by Depp and his brother, he drafted in friend and mentor Marlon Brando to play the part of a mysterious benefactor who offers a financially-stricken man enough money to secure his family’s future on the proviso that he agrees to star in a snuff film. It was a small-scale debut, but when the knives came out, the actor and filmmaker moved quickly to ensure his first feature wouldn’t be fatally stabbed.

“It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and I was an idiot to attempt it,” he exhaustedly told the Sun-Herald in early 1997. “It’s way too much work for one person.” Not that anybody was allowed to find out, with Depp reacting to a disastrous premiere that left his confidence so shaken he locked The Brave away in the vault, never to be seen again.

He flat-out refused to let it be screened to the public, shown on the big screen, or even released on home video, and considering that he also ended up investing millions of his own dollars into The Brave, history shows he definitely was an idiot for even attempting it looking at what happened afterwards.