If you thought the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise had sailed off into the wild blue yonder, think again! Disney is apparently exploring a Pirates of the Caribbean reboot, and they want the Deadpool writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to handle the script. Jerry Bruckheimer will still serve as producer, but there’s a good chance none of the original cast will return – including Johnny Depp.

Rather than bury the treasure chest that is the Pirates franchise, the House of Mouse is considering a reboot, according to Deadline. While this news is surprising, it’s not entirely out of the question. The five original Pirates films have made Disney somewhere around $4.5 billion over the last 14 years. At the same time, the franchise as we know has grown quite stale. The most recent film, 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, was the second-lowest grossing installment of the series. And Johnny Depp, who plays Jack Sparrow in the series, has seen his star diminish a bit over the years. Disney might be wise to just start over, without Depp or any of the other cast members.

It’s still too early to tell what’s going on here. All we know for sure is that if this happens, the Deadpool writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick will be penning the script. Reese and Wernick are in-demand right now, thanks to the box office glory of the two Deadpool films, but they don’t exactly seem like the right sort of fit for this material. They tend to write dark, ironic scripts – in addition to Deadpool they also wrote Zombieland and the Alien knock-off Life. The Pirates franchise needs writers who excel at conjuring up old-school, swashbuckling adventure. But we shall see how this turns out.

Based on the Walt Disney theme park ride of the same name, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise launched in 2003 with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. At the time, a film based on an amusement park ride seemed like a gamble, but the Gore Verbinski-directed adventure was a smash-hit, and even earned star Johnny Depp a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards. Curse of the Black Pearl was followed by sequels of extremely diminishing quality – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), and the previously mentioned Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017).

In my humble opinion, Curse of the Black Pearl is the only entry in the series that holds up, while the sequels are bloated messes. I’m certainly not against starting over fresh, and perhaps creating an even better series.