"I think there are studios that will be willing to work with him at this point," said Karen North, a University of Southern California professor specializing in reputation management.
Despite a string of recent flops, "he's almost always been very good for the box office," she said, noting that Depp is "as much in the public eye now as he ever has been because of the trial."
While a comeback from lurid accounts of alcohol- and drug-fueled binges could be problematic for someone with a more clean-cut image, Depp "has never said that he was a mild-mannered do-gooder."
"When somebody is a bit of a bad boy... when they're accused of doing something that involves being volatile, people say, 'Well, I'm not surprised -- it doesn't change who I think that person is.'"
"I think Johnny Depp is gonna come back personally, it makes sense," said North.
And if he were to return to the big screen, it would not necessarily need to be in glitzy Hollywood.
"He could become an indie darling, where the shoots are six to eight weeks, the payment is $250,000, and he gets 25 percent of the ownership of the movie, or something like that," said the producer who worked with Depp.
"And he could get nominated for some cool little role where the stakes aren't so high, and the budget's a couple million bucks, and he blows people away with some crazy performance."
And failing that?
"He'll work in Europe. I mean, they don't care about this kind of thing," said the producer.
"He'll make French films. He'll make German films."
