Vulture hears that Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp has been aggressively courting his Pirates 4 director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha) to direct him once again in a remake of The Thin Man at Warner Bros. It’d be a fitting follow-up to Depp’s turn as the rum-soaked Captain Jack Sparrow: The famous detective novel by Dashiell Hammett centers on Nick Charles who — after marrying wealthy, young socialite Norah — gives up a career as a hard-boiled gumshoe to become a semi-professional alcoholic and full-time trophy husband.
The Thin Man certainly wasn’t the Philip Marlowe of its day when it was first published in 1934 — Hammett never even wrote a sequel — but it did become a hit six-film franchise at MGM (with William Powell starring as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy playing Nora Charles) and an NBC series that ran from 1957 to 1959.
There’s no script yet for the remake, but we’re told that Depp is eager to play the role and has been looking to develop the property through his Warner Bros.–based Infinitum Nihil production outfit (run by his sister, Christi Dembrowski), with former WB executive turned producer Kevin McCormick also producing.
Meanwhile, we also hear that once Marshall wraps production on Pirates 4 later this year, he’ll be meeting with Universal execs and producer Marc Platt about the possibility of directing a motion picture based on Broadway’s Wicked, which, unlike Thin Man, actually has a script as well as many other significant directors in contention for the gig.