Rumors have been circulating that Disney is thinking about making another Pirates of the Caribbean movie. That’s not all that surprising. Although the last couple of entries in the series have under-performed in the United States, they remain profitable thanks to international box office. What sets this apart from previous Pirates movies is the possibility that the franchise might get a reboot. The degree to which this hypothetical movie would distance itself from the series to date is unknown at this time, but it seems likely that the reboot would include a Deppenectomy.
Let’s start at the beginning. When the first Pirates of the Caribbean (subtitled Curse of the Black Pearl for those who can keep the mostly meaningless subtitles straight) was released fifteen years ago, there was little reason to think that we were witnessing the birth of a long-running franchise. Disney’s previous attempt to turn a theme park attraction into a big screen hit was the kiddie flop, The Country Bears. Pirates was admittedly more commercial than a movie in which bear puppets played banjos, but it was far from a sure thing.
For one thing, no genre was more dead than pirate movies. Even Westerns and musicals had more life in them than swash-buckling pirates. The last time a major studio tried to do anything with pirates was the infamous flop, Cutthroat Island in 1995. A pirate movie based on a theme park attraction seems dead in the water. There was some star power to prop up the box office, but Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom were still unknowns when the first movie was released. Johnny Depp had a spotty track record at best. And Geoffrey Rush, while well-respected, wasn’t exactly a box office draw.
Even Disney had doubts about their Pirate movie. Every body has heard the story by now that Disney executives were so nervous about Johnny Depp’s eccentric performance as Captain Jack Sparrow that they nearly let him go. With hindsight, everyone laughed at the foolish suits for almost firing the actor who most everyone agreed made the movie. Without Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean wouldn’t have been all that different from Cutthroat Island.
When the first movie was a hit, Disney did what Disney does. They ordered up sequels of course. Two of them filmed back-to-back. The scripts weren’t ready yet, but that was a small matter. Just give the writers piles of money and have them come up with something on the set. They’re smart guys. They’ll figure something out. We’ve got release dates to meet!
That kind of short-sighted thinking didn’t prevent the sequels (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End) from being big box office hits in 2006 & 2007. But audiences likely felt burned by the haphazard plot and characterization. The scripts for the sequels felt very much like first drafts with characters double crossing each other so often it was impossible to keep anyone’s motivations straight. I doubt even the screenwriters could explain some of the trickier bits of mythology involving the various curses and barnacle people. These movies were a mess.
But they made money and Disney wanted to keep on making money. So they carried on beyond the original trilogy. There seemed to be little reason to keep writing checks to Bloom and Knightley. By now, it was widely acknowledged that Depp was the franchise. In a fit of rare sanity, someone decided to keep Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbosa in the next two movies as well. But Depp was clearly the star. Captain Jack had gone from sidekick to leading man.
Unfortunately, that proved to be too much of a good thing for many fans. Depp’s highly stylized performance worked best as comic relief. Jack Sparrow is a great supporting character, but it’s hard to invest in him too deeply as the protagonist. He’s got no weight. The character was designed to be a goofball and the sequels never provide him greater depth.
Audiences weren’t just burning out on Depp as Sparrow. In most of his non-Pirates movies, he played similarly eccentric characters in weird get-ups. Following turns as the Mad Hatter, Willy Wonka and Barnabas Collins, audiences had just about had enough of Depp’s shtick. When he reunited with his Pirates director, Gore Verbinski, to play Tonto in a remake of The Lone Ranger, even Depp’s fans stayed home in droves.
The most recent entry in the series, Dead Men Tell No Tales, was a box office bomb in the US. With a box office gross of under $200 million dollars, it failed to recoup its productions costs stateside. That usually signals the death of a franchise, but action movies like Pirates tend to do very well overseas because the language barrier is less of an issue for a movie that doesn’t really make any sense anyway. Pirates 5 grossed over $600 million dollars internationally! That’s enough to keep the series afloat despite American apathy.
No doubt about it, Johnny Depp contributed to the box office success overseas. While domestic audiences have grown tired of his shenanigans, Depp is still a big star in other countries. That poses a tricky problem for Disney. They want to make another Pirates movie based on the international ticket sales which they know were powered at least in part by their leading man. But they also want to cut Depp loose due to the bad press he’s been getting in recent years.
Disney is notoriously skittish about bad press. They fired James Gunn off of the popular Guardians of the Galaxy movies for some ancient tweets for which he had apologized. The accusations, provable or not, that Depp abused his ex-wife cannot sit well with the bosses at the Mouse House. Especially in the era of the #MeToo movement. Warner Brothers is willing to cast Depp as a villain in their Harry Potter spin-off movies, but Disney pretty clearly wants to get out of the Jack Sparrow business.
So what do they do now? The cleanest and probably riskiest thing to do would be to start from scratch. The general concept is so broad that the brand can be applied to literally any family-friendly pirate movie. It can even be somewhat risque. The ride these movies were based on has always had issues with political correctness. If Disney can find a decent swash-buckler they could reinvent the franchise. Or they could make the next Cutthroat Island.
Alternatively, the studio could keep some elements of the original movies. The most recent movie teased the further adventures of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s characters but it’s hard to imagine that as a new starting point. Or they could ween themselves off of Depp by giving him a small cameo in a movie featuring a mostly new cast. But again, that presents some problems. If Jack Sparrow shows up at all in the movie’s marketing, the movie will be indistinguishable in the mind’s of most audiences from the forgettable sequels. But if he doesn’t, will audiences give new pirates a chance?
I suspect Disney will roll the dice on a new set of swash-bucklers. There’s too much to gain not to take a chance. They are not known for leaving money on the table. What will be interesting to see is the degree to which they reinvent the tone of the series. As much as I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Caribbean, the tone proved unsustainable. The sequels quickly pushed into cartoonish extremes in an effort to outdo the original. Perhaps a more grounded pirate movie without killer mermaids and zombie sharks could be just the trick. Come up with a good enough story and it just might work.
Otherwise, they should just let it die!
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