The Cursed Half-Life of the Pirates Franchise

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are deader than a skeleton pirate, by which I mean, not dead enough

Pick your bad Johnny Depp role:

[maggie]

She tells the pirates how to follow the stars at night. She tells pirates, who have been sailing for 20+ years, that they can use the stars as navigation!

[cjames]

The Pirates movies should be like the Mad Max movies, where it's really somebody else's story and Jack Sparrow just wanders into the middle of it.

[matman]

In the first movie, Jack was a smart, inventive character who always managed to get out of trouble by surprising and manipulating his enemies. Then they turned him into a drunken idiot who survives thanks to pure luck.

[superskh]

solution to barbossa being old and "not hot": bring in the fountain of youth and recast barbossa as like...this young hot pirate ready to relive his glory days. the teens will love it.

[ripwitch]

We need a Pirates movie where they only use Jack Sparrow impersonators, but each time a scene changes, it's a different impersonator. No one will be the wiser till the credits come and there's a huge list for who played Jack Sparrow.

[stephenturner]

I love the effort Jenny puts into her themed outfit and pillow combinations.

[DiegoPoop]

The addition of a 4th and 5th Pirates movies after the climax of the original 3 feels like when you have a nice goodbye with someone but then you both walk away going the same direction. And it just becomes awkward still being around this person after the goodbye.

[The_Bee_Jones]

At this point I'm assuming you have a massive storage unit somewhere overflowing with stuffed animals and movie paraphernalia.

[Yammenkow]

The other element of Jack Sparrow's mystique that makes him work in the 1st movie the ambiguity of whether he is even competent. He is constantly being underestimated by some characters ("that's the worst pirate I've ever seen") and overestimated by others (believing his tale about tying sea turtles together). Even the audience, when you learn he used to be the captain of the Pearl, you're supposed to think "THAT guy?? Was a legit captain?? Really?" He rides that line between a legend and a fraud and that's what makes him interesting. Which is why in by the third movie, when he is literally recognized by all the pirates as one of a small handful of pirate legends and his dad is the pirate loremaster or whatever it dispels that ambiguity and makes him kind of boring.

[HerHollyness]

That clunker of a title drop was even worse in the UK and other foreign markets where, for some unknown reason, the title was changed to ‘Salazar’s Revenge’. So he does this whole awkward lead up to the phrase ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’, and then the title card appears showing a completely different title! Absolutely ridiculous.

[Niobesnuppa]

Honestly, I think the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise would work a lot better as a series if they went more with the Mad Max route and made Jack Sparrow be this mysterious side character that ties the movies together. That way he would continue to have the appeal and mystery he had in the first movie, and the audience woldn't become overexposed to him. This would also be a slightly more unique way of doing a series, by making the main characters be new and unknown eah time while the most well-known character works more in the background.

[Darastrixx]

My biggest problem with the franchise was the colour pallet. The same happened with the Harry Potter series. When I saw the first Pirates of the Caribbean I was so impressed with how bright and colourful it was, but then the sequels got darker and darker and bleached the colour out.

[mcolville]

"If you're gonna kill Captain Barbossa then what even is the point of these movies?"
Word.

[zeddpool]

Honestly, the movies failed because Disney doesn’t know that Elizabeth was the main character

[brentc]

The big problem with the 5th movie is Jack's backstory.

He's like, a teenager and already a pirate, then blah blah, he gets the respect of the crew and becomes captain.

Except in the third movie, his conversation with Beckett, reveals that Jack was a merchant, then Beckett made him captain a slave ship, and Jack freed the slaves, becoming a pirate. "People aren't cargo mate."

[ajgreen]

I think Johnny Depp is actually dead and his purgatory is to keep making Pirates movies because Disney owns his soul.

[Qwazin]

Agreed. Jack Sparrow is fun in the original movie because he is constantly twisting and turning and you can never tell what side he's on, if he knows what he's doing or if he's just making it up as he goes. In the sequels it's just like "OH. No I guess he just IS making it all up as he goes along" and all the mystery and excitement of the character is gone.

[Mjolnir]

Problem is they reduce him to be comedic and funny, but forget his brilliance, swordmanship and cunning intellect that he hides behind being weird. He runs away all the time instead of outsmarting and defeating his enemies.

[TriggerGirl]

"He became like a cool, rebellious, but still nice pirate, who looked like Orlando Bloom"
And that's how you sell a movie

[IanZainea]

Pirates 6. They arrive in Haiti during the Revolution. In the first 5 minutes Jack sparrow gets his head chopped off. Then we sorta just tell a condensed version of the Haitian Revolution.