Last week was a bit existential—even if only hyperbolically—and since we in the good ol US of A are having a holiday this week, I thought I’d write something I’ve been meaning to for a few months, since my wife and I watched all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
The pirates sequels are amazing. They're like 'For a Few Dollars More' and 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' More ambitious, more subversive, more postmodern. Admittedly, DMC suffered from bad editing and messy storytelling due to a super rushed post production schedule that nearly killed Gore Verbinski, but AWE came out as a near-masterpiece.
I definitely agree with the fact that this was ALWAYS the Will/Elizabeth story. I mean, the writers were quite open about it in interviews, even discussing how they viewed Elizabeth as the overall main lead of the trilogy as a whole. Jack was always a side character, a wild card trickster that can play a key role in the story but doesn't quite work as its center.
Unfortunately, because Johnny Depp got more and more creative control over the series as it went on, he basically built the fourth and fifth films around himself, and the results were not great, to say the least. There were lots of other reasons for diminishing quality, of course, but I'd say this was one of the main reasons. Imo, if they had to make a Jack Sparrow movie, they should've gone the prequel route by adapting The Price of Freedom novel, which connected the dots in terms of how Jack went from being a sailor under Beckett to a pirate and sold his soul to Jones. Like, there you have an actual arc and everything.
I also think ideally they should've left AWE as the end. Like, the original plan was that Will would've been set free from his service because Elizabeth had been faithful to him for 10 years. That, sadly, for some reason got lost or edited out in post production.
(I don't know what that meant for the Dutchman - perhaps a new captain would've been elected out of the crew members?)
I think a big part of the failure of the later movies is because Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley had no interest in making another one. Since the story is really about them, they should've dropped the idea of doing more without them.
Though I do think focusing on their son would have been a good way to go about it and required very little time commitment from them. But alas!
My impression is that Disney was always more interested in keeping Depp than bringing them back. It could've been that they really weren't interested but I think they might've been willing to come back if Disney really pushed for them and if it
hadn't made the production of the sequels an absolute nightmare. Launched without finished scripts, filming delays, crunched post schedule - Gore Verbinski probably lost a few years of his life there.
Interestingly, Bloom did talk about how with Pirates 5, the idea was to reboot the franchise to focus on Will and his son. So, had POTC 6 moved forward, the Turner family was gonna be back in the center. But maybe it's for the best that it didn't happen, as the script they went with for DMTNT was pretty bad, imo.
I know Knightley said that she never wanted to make one of those movies again because the filming simply took too long. Which I can sympathize with, haha
The pirates sequels are amazing. They're like 'For a Few Dollars More' and 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' More ambitious, more subversive, more postmodern. Admittedly, DMC suffered from bad editing and messy storytelling due to a super rushed post production schedule that nearly killed Gore Verbinski, but AWE came out as a near-masterpiece.
I definitely agree with the fact that this was ALWAYS the Will/Elizabeth story. I mean, the writers were quite open about it in interviews, even discussing how they viewed Elizabeth as the overall main lead of the trilogy as a whole. Jack was always a side character, a wild card trickster that can play a key role in the story but doesn't quite work as its center.
Unfortunately, because Johnny Depp got more and more creative control over the series as it went on, he basically built the fourth and fifth films around himself, and the results were not great, to say the least. There were lots of other reasons for diminishing quality, of course, but I'd say this was one of the main reasons. Imo, if they had to make a Jack Sparrow movie, they should've gone the prequel route by adapting The Price of Freedom novel, which connected the dots in terms of how Jack went from being a sailor under Beckett to a pirate and sold his soul to Jones. Like, there you have an actual arc and everything.
I also think ideally they should've left AWE as the end. Like, the original plan was that Will would've been set free from his service because Elizabeth had been faithful to him for 10 years. That, sadly, for some reason got lost or edited out in post production.
(I don't know what that meant for the Dutchman - perhaps a new captain would've been elected out of the crew members?)
I think a big part of the failure of the later movies is because Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley had no interest in making another one. Since the story is really about them, they should've dropped the idea of doing more without them.
Though I do think focusing on their son would have been a good way to go about it and required very little time commitment from them. But alas!
My impression is that Disney was always more interested in keeping Depp than bringing them back. It could've been that they really weren't interested but I think they might've been willing to come back if Disney really pushed for them and if it
hadn't made the production of the sequels an absolute nightmare. Launched without finished scripts, filming delays, crunched post schedule - Gore Verbinski probably lost a few years of his life there.
Interestingly, Bloom did talk about how with Pirates 5, the idea was to reboot the franchise to focus on Will and his son. So, had POTC 6 moved forward, the Turner family was gonna be back in the center. But maybe it's for the best that it didn't happen, as the script they went with for DMTNT was pretty bad, imo.
Yeah, agreed.
I know Knightley said that she never wanted to make one of those movies again because the filming simply took too long. Which I can sympathize with, haha