‘Kon-Tiki’ Helmers Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg Land
‘Pirates Of The Caribbean 5′
By MIKE FLEMING JR | Wednesday May 29, 2013 @ 4:15pm PDT
EXCLUSIVE: As Deadline Hollywood predicted last month, the
Kon-Tiki directing team of Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg have landed the
job directing Pirates Of The Caribbean 5. Disney, Johnny Depp and producer
Jerry Bruckheimer have all signed off on the choice, and negotiations are
underway on a deal that will make quickly. The duo will come aboard to prep the
massive movie for a late year or early January start.
The studio is getting the script ship-shape, and they are
bullish after getting a rewrite from Jeff Nathanson. This is an enormous coup
for the Norwegian directing team who just fell out of the Legendary Pictures
film Spectral. I’d written recently about Disney’s short list, and the fact
these guys were atop it. Fredrik Bond, who helmed The Necessary Death Of
Charlie Countryman, was also on the list as was Snow White And The Huntsman
helmer Rupert Sanders.This is a game-changing job for a director or directing
team, and it’s a case of these guys getting hot at exactly the right time. All
of the momentum for Rønning and Sandberg came from their remarkable Best
Foreign Language Oscar-nominated film Kon-Tiki, a dramatization of Thor
Heyerdal’s epic 4,300-mile crossing of the Pacific on a balsa wood raft in
1947, in an effort prove it was possible for South Americans to settle in
Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. They made a lot of movie with a little money
and showed they knew how to shoot on the water. As for Disney, the studio made
an unexpected choice for the last film, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger
Tides, with Rob Marshall, and that grossed over $1 billion. The directors are
repped by UTA, which also reps Depp and Jeff Nathanson, so this is a pretty big
piece of business for that agency. They are managed by Brillstein Entertainment
Partners.
