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06th Apr 2023

Johnny Depp’s comeback movie to open the Cannes Film Festival next month

Rory Cashin

Johnny Depp

It will be Johnny Depp’s first major cinematic role since 2018.

It has been confirmed that Johnny Depp’s next movie, titled Jeanne Du Barry, will open this year’s Cannes Film Festival. This is Depp’s first big screen appearance since a jury unanimously found in favour of Depp following a defamation lawsuit between him and his ex-wife Amber Heard.

This is also Johnny Depp’s first cinematic performance since 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, as he was replaced as the character of Gellert Grindelwald by Mads Mikkelsen for 2021’s The Secrets of Dumbledore.

Since then, his movies have seen incredibly small releases with even smaller box office returns, such as 2018’s City Of Lies ($2.8 million box office worldwide), 2019’s Waiting for the Barbarians (less than $1 million) and 2020’s Minamata ($1.7 million).

For his new movie, Depp is reportedly performing entirely in French as Louis XV, and will co-star with Maïwenn (Switchblade Romance, The Fifth Element), who is also the director and writer of the movie. Maïwenn will play the titular Jeanne Du Barry, and the film’s official plot synopsis is as follows:

“Jeanne, a young working-class woman hungry for culture and pleasure, uses her intelligence and allure to climb the rungs of the social ladder one by one. She becomes the favourite of King Louis XV who, unaware of her status as courtesan, regains through her his appetite for life. They fall madly in love and, against all propriety and etiquette, Jeanne moves to Versailles, where her arrival scandalises the court.

The film will premiere as the opening film for the Cannes Film Festival this year, on Tuesday 16 May, with other movies already confirmed for this year’s festival including Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of the Destiny.

Beyond the release of Jeanne Du Barry, Johnny Depp has yet to be be cast in any major production since the outcome of the defamation trial.

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