Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel has been adapted dozens of times — but never with a screenwriter whose documented obsession with how systems corrupt young men maps so precisely onto Long John Silver's psychology. That convergence is what makes the Treasure Island package that hit the Hollywood market on Monday genuinely unusual: Ridley Scott directing, Hugh Jackman as Silver, and Adolescence writer Jack Thorne on the screenplay, with every major studio except 20th Century Fox now in active bidding as of Tuesday morning.
Thorne, whose Netflix series Adolescence swept the 2025 Emmy Awards and prompted the British Parliament to debate online radicalization of boys, has spent the past three years on a very specific thematic project: how environments produce moral failure in men. Adolescence followed a 13-year-old boy driven to violence by online incel culture. His Netflix Lord of the Flies adaptation, which premiered on the BBC in February 2026, applied the same lens to even younger boys. Treasure Island is the third installment in an unannounced trilogy: a 17th-century pirate novel in which Long John Silver is not a villain but a man whose class resentment and moral pragmatism were shaped by the same kind of systemic lawlessness — just without an algorithm to accelerate it.
"We're making a point about masculinity. We're trying to get inside a problem," Thorne said of Adolescence — a description that applies with equal force to Silver, the character Stevenson himself described as driven by practical considerations and desired outcomes rather than ideology.
Map That History Never Made: Pirate Cartography Was Not Romance
Before a single pirate wore a wooden leg on screen, before any map bore an X, real buccaneers stole something far more valuable than gold: Spanish navigational atlases. In 1681, English pirate Bartholomew Sharp captured a Spanish derrotero — a hand-drawn atlas of Pacific sailing routes — from the vessel Rosario off the coast of Ecuador. The Spanish captain reportedly wept when it was taken. Sharp returned to London in 1682 to face murder charges. What saved him was surrendering that atlas to King Charles II, who had it copied into English by London mapmaker William Hack. The navigational intelligence it contained, covering the Pacific coast from Acapulco to Cape Horn, gave England a maritime advantage it had lacked for decades.
Stevenson knew none of this when he drew a map to entertain his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in a Scottish cottage in 1881 and invented the "X marks the spot" convention that every pirate film since has taken as historical fact. No authenticated pirate treasure map exists in any archive worldwide. Real pirate cartography was navigational intelligence — captured empire's logistical infrastructure — not romantic clue-finding. Stevenson's treasure map was a Victorian storyteller's invention that became the genre's foundation, including the DNA of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, whose parent company 20th Century Fox explicitly declined the new film to avoid competing with its own reboot.
How Dead Reckoning Explains Why the Map Cannot Be Trusted
The treasure map in Treasure Island carries an implicit claim that the source material never examines: that Captain Flint's directions are recoverable. That claim depends entirely on 18th-century navigation science that was, at best, unreliable.
Longitude — east-west position — could not be determined accurately at sea before John Harrison's marine chronometer H4, completed in 1759 and widely adopted only after 1800. Before that, every ship's navigator used dead reckoning: calculating position by multiplying speed by heading by elapsed time from a known fix. The method accumulated error with every passing day. On a 30-day Caribbean voyage, uncorrected dead reckoning could place a ship 15 to 60 degrees of longitude off course, depending on current, wind, and the accuracy of the log. A treasure map, then, is not a document but a wager: the gold is recoverable only if the person who buried it kept a log accurate enough to invert the calculation years or decades later.
Stevenson set his novel in the 18th century and never addressed this constraint — because he was writing in 1883, when the longitude problem was long solved and its difficulty was invisible. A Ridley Scott production that applies Scott's characteristic historical materialism — his tendency to render period conditions as physical textures — would be the first major Treasure Island adaptation to take that epistemological problem seriously. In Scott's hands, the map becomes what the Bartholomew Sharp derrotero actually was: a piece of captured intelligence whose value is contingent on the accuracy of its chain of custody.
Ridley Scott's First Pirate Film, at 88, Arrives at Industry Crossroads
In a 50-year directing career that spans Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, The Martian, and Napoleon, Ridley Scott has never made a pirate film. He has made films about Roman gladiators, Crusader knights, medieval duels, and 15th-century explorers — all periods requiring the same texture of physical, pre-modern life that a Golden Age of Piracy story demands. The package he is developing with producer Michael Pruss for Scott Free Productions represents his first foray into the genre that Stevenson's 1883 novel essentially created.
Scott's next film, The Dog Stars — a post-apocalyptic thriller starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley — is scheduled for 20th Century release in August 2026 and received a new trailer on Monday. That 20th Century relationship is why the studio got first look at the Treasure Island package — and why it passed, according to Deadline: Disney, its parent company, has Pirates of the Caribbean as a live-action priority and declined to place a competing pirate franchise into development at the same moment.
The decision opened the bidding to every other major Hollywood studio simultaneously, and sources described the package Monday as one of the hottest in the current market. Treasure Island is the second major adaptation of the novel announced in 2026 alone: MGM+ is separately developing a television series with David Oyelowo as Long John Silver and Hayley Atwell, Jack Huston, and Tom Sweet among the cast.
Hugh Jackman as Silver: An EGOT Pursuit Behind the Eyepatch
Hugh Jackman brings a specific career geometry to Long John Silver. He has played Wolverine across nine X-Men films, Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman, and — a decade ago — Captain Blackbeard in Joe Wright's Pan. He now takes on Long John Silver, literature's most famous morally ambiguous pirate, the character Stevenson described as the first complex anti-hero of the adventure genre.
Jackman holds a Tony Award (The Boy from Oz, 2004), an Emmy (hosting the 58th Tony Awards, 2005), and a Grammy (The Greatest Showman cast album, 2019). He needs an Oscar to complete his EGOT, having received his one nomination for Les Misérables in 2013 before losing to Daniel Day-Lewis. His next screen appearance before Treasure Island enters production is The Death of Robin Hood, an A24 film from director Michael Sarnoski that opens June 19, 2026 — another iconic literary character, another morally complex outlaw.
Jacob Elordi, who stars in Scott's The Dog Stars, has been reported as a candidate for Jim Hawkins, but that casting is unconfirmed and reportedly contingent on whether Elordi secures the James Bond role first.
Golden Age of Piracy Was an Employment Crisis, Not a Romantic Lifestyle
The world Thorne is writing into existed because wars ended. The Golden Age of Piracy, running roughly from 1650 to 1730, arose from a surplus of trained maritime laborers who had nowhere legal to work once European colonial hostilities subsided. The end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714 left thousands of experienced sailors and former privateers without employment, naval commissions, or legal income. The Spanish New Spain and Terra Firma treasure fleets remained enormously valuable targets. Caribbean governors were often corrupt. The result was a labor-market failure that produced piracy as its rational response.
Long John Silver is a product of this history, not an aberration from it. His class hostility toward Squire Trelawney — the landed English gentleman who owns the ship and views Silver as a hireable tool — is the novel's sharpest structural tension, the one that Thorne, whose work consistently examines how masculine socialization produces moral dissociation, is best positioned to render. Stevenson drew Silver as a man of pragmatic intelligence forced into piracy by a world that offered no legitimate meritocracy to someone of his class, his disability, and his ambition.
What No Prior Treasure Island Adaptation Has Attempted
Every significant Treasure Island adaptation on film — Disney's 1950 live-action version, the 1990 TV film with Charlton Heston and Christian Bale, Muppet Treasure Island (1996), Treasure Planet (2002) — has treated the source material as a children's adventure story with a colorful villain at its center. The Black Sails prequel series, which ran on Starz from 2014 to 2017, is the only prior screen adaptation to have interrogated the historical and economic conditions behind the piracy — and it did so as a prequel, not as an adaptation of Stevenson's novel itself.
The Thorne-Scott combination is the first to approach the novel with a screenwriter whose documented thematic concerns — systemic corruption, masculine identity shaped by institutional failure — map directly onto what the novel is actually about: a boy's epistemological education in adult deception, and a pirate's survival intelligence shaped by a world that never offered him a legitimate alternative. What that looks like on screen will depend on which studio acquires the package and how much creative autonomy Scott and Thorne negotiate. No production start date, casting for Jim Hawkins, or release timeline has been announced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is playing Long John Silver in the new Treasure Island movie?
Hugh Jackman is attached to play Long John Silver in Ridley Scott's Treasure Island adaptation. The role is part of a package that also includes Jack Thorne, Emmy-winning writer of Adolescence, as screenwriter. No studio has been attached as of June 9, 2026, with active bidding underway.
Why did Disney pass on the Ridley Scott Treasure Island movie?
20th Century Studios, which is a Disney subsidiary, received first look at the package due to its long-standing relationship with Scott and Scott Free Productions. Disney declined because it has Pirates of the Caribbean listed as a live-action priority, and executives chose not to develop a competing pirate franchise on the same schedule, according to Deadline.
What makes this Treasure Island adaptation different from prior versions?
Jack Thorne's documented thematic focus — how environments produce moral failure in men, as shown in Adolescence and his Lord of the Flies adaptation — maps directly onto Long John Silver's character: a man whose pragmatic amorality was shaped by class exclusion and systemic failure, not innate villainy. Ridley Scott's approach to historical periods as tactile, material realities gives the adaptation a credible path toward treating the buried-treasure map as what it actually is in navigation science — a wager on the accuracy of a dead-reckoning log — rather than a romantic prop.
How many times has Treasure Island been adapted on screen?
The novel has been adapted dozens of times since entering the public domain in 1944 in the United States. Major versions include the 1950 Disney live-action film (its first), the 1990 television film starring Charlton Heston and Christian Bale, Muppet Treasure Island (1996), the animated Treasure Planet (2002), and the Starz prequel series Black Sails (2014–2017). A concurrent MGM+ television series with David Oyelowo as Long John Silver and Hayley Atwell in the cast is also in development as of 2026.
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