Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

[Bill1978]

except that Cruise looks "too clean,"

That was my first thought as wel. Especially in the first picture. Throw some dirt on the woman. Even Keira got dirty in the original movie.

[Ben]

Cruz.

And they all look clean here: this is potentially before the action begins. And obviously before Pirates 5 and 6.

[EricJ]

Nnnnope--This is the official Santa Clause 3 of the series, where they "had" to make it, but only the last two core actors were contracted to return and they only had one or two of the sets left.

(The reason they "had" to being the whole corporate politics at the time about Tom Sawyer's Island at Disneyland, and by the time they got all that ironed out, and Pirates 3 had been pretty well buried for good and all, they were already married to the greenlit project in whatever form it would take.
And if it wasn't for somebody else's unrelated book, we would never have even gotten a complete filmable storyline out of THAT. They like their title too much by now to retitle it "The Final Chapter" by the time it hits theaters, but I sense a bit of Shrek/Saw franchise-fatalism at work.)

[Ben]

Seriously, when you ramble, I am just swamped with words and can't actually find the argument within the torrent of letters!

[Dacey]

Cruz.

D'oh! That's what happens when I spend the evening joking about Tom Cruise with my brother.

[EricJ]

Seriously, when you ramble, I am just swamped with words and can't actually find the argument within the torrent of letters!

Okay, translation:
1) Generic sequel-weary jokes aside, there IS no "Pirates 5 or 6" likely on the docket in the near future, nor will there likely be the urge to put them on, because
2) It was an accident of bad timing--and either hubris or contractual obligation to stop it from being cancelled--that #4 got made at all, since
3) The entire impetus for the project had originally been to justify Tom Sawyer's Island at Disneyland as "Pirates Island" by doing a story to tie it in with New Orleans Square (which idea has now since been changed, and the park rehab went through without a movie), thus leaving
4) A sequel with no cast members returning except for the two money leads, different screenwriters, and outside third-party source material that had nothing to do with the three earlier films, particularly after
5) The merchandising (which is the usual reason for justifying a sequel) for Pirates 3 had been a catastrophic disaster, and there had been plans to retire the franchise on the trilogy, if not for the above reasons.

(And again, they're probably not going to retitle it "The Final Chapter", but....does it sound like they ever want to do another one? )

[Randall]

Again, they'll do another one if this one makes enough money. That's the bottom line.

[Ben]

Generic sequel-weary jokes aside, there IS no "Pirates 5 or 6" likely on the docket in the near future, nor will there likely be the urge to put them on...

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-capt ... ck-to-back

Okay, so not a studio announcement (yet), but Depp has said he'd want to do at least another and, as the article says, expect some "we're loving Johnny's work in this one so much that we're doing 5 and 6" talk when they're all out promoting this one next summer.

[Dan]

What's interesting is that Cruz is six-months pregnant with her and Javier Bardem's first kid. Meaning they had to figure some way to film around the obviously growing baby bump, which I'm sure gave the costume designers headaches.

The Daily Mail notes that, towards the latter end of shooting, they would film Penelope for close-ups, but for long-distance scenes they recruited her younger identical sister Monica to stand in.

[Ben]

More on Pirates 5:

Johnny's up for it (we knew that):
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=73227

Terry Rossio is back to write, but without Ted Elliott:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=73251

My bet is they'll start preliminary work on it and, if #4 is huge, they'll expand it to back-to-back 5 and 6 as we've heard rumored before.

[DisneyPictures]

Hi guys,

I work for Disney and thought you might like to see this interview Johnny Depp did about the movie. And here's a couple of new pictures for you!

[Ben]

Disney, Bruckheimer, writer Terry Rossio and potentially director Rob Marshall are "in", but Johnny Depp wants to wait a while before jumping back into Captain Jack Sparrow's boots:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/p ... ney-185357


This is either quite a smart move so as to not wear the character out too soon, but more likely a push to get a bigger salary: Depp has previously said he'd be happy to play Jack until he dropped dead of running around. Nevertheless, Rossio wouldn't have been commissioned to write a script if Depp was against the idea, and indeed they would have thought about ideas or at least a central concept during the shooting of the last one. But that's Hollywood! Given the tracking on Pirates 4, I'd say that Pirates 5 would be with us in for the holidays in 2013 or summer 2014...but it will happen.

[droosan]

I enjoyed On Stranger Tides well enough .. but somehow, it felt more like an Indiana Jones sequel (and a rather good one, at that!) than a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.


On to PotC 5: We Want the Redhead!!



Seriously .. there's still several fun scenes within the ride which the movies haven't yet touched upon.

[Ben]

I thought it was okay, but not as good as the first three (and certainly not as good as the first two).

In fact, I thought a lot of it just went through the motions. Rob Marshall didn't really bring anything new to what Gore Verbinski had basically set up, and it could have been Verbinski directing, but then by this point these things kind of make themselves. I agree that there is much more from the ride that could be incorporated, and in fact it was these kinds of things that I missed this time around.

Depp held the whole thing together by basically doing Jack Sparrow as usual, while I didn't think Penelope Cruz really added anything too special and they had a potentially terrifically scary villain in Blackbeard (who everyone has heard of) and they didn't do anything with him, he just wandered around being a bit mean-looking every now and then.

Hans Zimmer's score was most disappointing, and mostly it just sounded as if they had taken the master cues from the first three and just dropped them in at appropriate moments: this wasn't so much a score as a series of previously used tracks. And I thought the picture editing was rather sloppy, especially in the first half.

The 3D added literally nothing, and it's not a surprise to read that 47% of people chose to see the film in non-3D screens (we only saw it in 3D because of the timings of the flat showings, which we couldn't make). I've yet to go and see a film that has been 3D-converted, but apparently Pirates 4 was shot in 3D - not that you would know!

The film was basically flat the whole time, with a slightly added bit of depth, and like Tron: Legacy was so dark in places that it started to strain my eyes over the almost 3-hour program time (including ads and trailers). Around 40 minutes from the end of the film, I decided to take the specs off - and what do you know? Every character was solid sharp the whole time, with only the occasional background - which would have been out of focus anyway - only slightly fuzzy.

I looked around at the other people still wearing their glasses for little reason, and I actually saw another guy had taken his off too. What a crock, to charge extra for a 3D film that could easily be watched and enjoyed flat at the same time. Only two or three times did they use the extra D to poke something out of the screen, and every one of those times it was a sword blade, which instead of being sharp and deadly looking, was out of focus.

Nope...animation might have something to add in the 3D stakes, but all the live-action I've seen so far does nothing - especially when you can literally take the glasses off and still watch the thing perfectly well.

Pirates 4 was okay, but from the post-credit additional scene, it looks like 5 could be the better one in this rumored new trilogy, which I'll still look forward to until they really start repeating themselves too often.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Pirates Of The Caribbean single-handedly brought back the pirate genre and then sunk it all over again!?

[droosan]

The score does indeed seem to have been mostly re-used cues from the first three films; The On Stranger Tides soundtrack album has less than 20 minutes of orchestral music .. the rest is techno 're-mixes', and guitar themes which are not heard in the movie. I had to 'pass' on buying it; which felt odd, because I adore all three of the previous PotC scores.

Didn't bother with the 3D version. Sounds like I made the right call.

I thought London was nicely-realized in the opening scenes .. The Queen Anne's Revenge was a pretty nifty set-piece, too .. even though its supernatural trappings were never sufficiently explained..! The mermaid was cute (and sympathetic) .. but her sub-plot likewise trailed off into ether.

But -- as I said before -- it was the (seemingly arbitrary) quests to collect relics, cryptic warnings/puzzles, and most especially the climax which made this seem to be more of an Indiana Jones sequel than a PotC movie.

.. but it was still a fun flick. And that's all I'd expected of it, really.