Today, Johnny Depp celebrates his 59th birthday as a winner in a feud with Amber Heard, and fans didn’t seem to have any doubts for a minute about this outcome, despite his ex-wife’s scandalous statements. After all, we are talking about Jack Sparrow. About Captain Jack Sparrow. And since everything has already been said about the court, it’s time to recall another no less loud episode in his life – “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
Almost 19 years ago, the first film in the saga that marked the beginning of the cult adventure franchise and gave us Captain Jack was released worldwide, and the film’s writers received five Oscar nominations and more than half a billion dollars at the box office. they come. For a somewhat outdated story about pirates at the time, this was a strong start and they managed to raise the bar and audience attention for a few more years, but the fourth and fifth episodes sank the Disney project and the last one. it even received three Golden Raspberry nominations (a good push from the Oscar to the world’s main anti-award, right?), sadly ending the once promising pirate saga.
Everyone to work!
When Walt Disney Pictures created “The Pirates”, inspired by the appeal of the same name set up at Disneyland, namely good entertainment for kids and adults, it logically turned out to be a good entertainment project. At the same time, the studio took a big risk: firstly, the era of pirate cinema ended in the 1940s, and secondly, it was difficult to compete at the box office with other fantasy action films of the early 2000s (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter “).
Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio helped create a fascinating story by writing Aladdin and Shrek and presenting a new reading of the classic pirate movies – that’s how a mystical streak of cursed and dark magic in Pirates of the Caribbean was born. The matter remained with the choice of the protagonist for the role, for which Matthew McConaughey was considered alternately, then Jim Carrey, then Christopher Walken, then Cary Elwes. Yep, Johnny Depp, who had earned the reputation of a Hollywood handsome man and star of a serious movie in the early 2000s, wasn’t exactly inviting for a family blockbuster role. After hearing that the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park would soon be made into a movie, he came to Walt Disney Pictures on his own and came up with the idea for the eccentric and rebellious image of Jack Sparrow. be careful (studio head Michael Eisner: “It’s ruining the movie!”). As the actor himself admits, he made such a reading of his character while studying the pirates of the 18th century and saw in them a resemblance to rock stars, and therefore he borrowed some elements of the image from his guitarist friend Keith Richards. From the Rolling Stones. Hence the pretentiousness, the painted eyes, the dreadlocks, the rum in the bosom and dozens of jewels.
However, it worked, and another criterion for the success of the project was Gore Verbinski, who was invited to the position of director – after the successful adaptation of the Japanese “Ring”, he knew exactly how to make an authentic to an unusual story. characters.
In general, “Pirates” clearly managed to embody the “charm” on the screen. It was adventurous, beautiful, gorgeous, dramatically thought out (what’s the line with Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan who couldn’t be together), funny and even scary in some places – overall, the ideal recipe for a successful commercial project was: a little bit of mysticism, good graphics, in mind It looks like a classic adventure story with a persistent musical theme (which, by the way, Hans Zimmer worked on this episode), was found and eventually paid for itself, so Walt Disney Pictures began work on two sequels to the first movie, right after the movie’s premiere. The question was simply how would such a great success be repeated? ..
“It’s worth dying once and priorities change instantly”
The second installment of the Dead Man’s Chest saga, which aired three years after the first, was the saga’s most successful film, earning the studio an Oscar for Best Visual Effects and more than a billion dollars at the box office, but the Producers realized it was time to finish this story before it had exhausted itself, so “The World’s World” The End” was premeditated as the finale of the famous series that has already managed to conquer the world. They turned out to be right, and this became even more evident after the premiere of the third part of “Pirates”. Yes, there were two Oscar nominations, again almost a billion at the box office, but the audience complained about the abundance of secondary lines, the length of the plot and the tiredness of the unchanging image of Johnny Depp.
Director Gore Verbinski not only repeated a recipe that had already worked, but also tried to bring something new to the series – deeper, more serious, darker. Partly it worked, partly, as the reviews show, no. He planned to stop at the third series of “The End of the World”, and this is read even at the end of the movie, when the same pirate song with which the saga opens by little Elizabeth Swan is already sung by her son.
True, Walt Disney Pictures didn’t agree with that, but couldn’t agree with the director of the original three episodes, so Rob Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha) took the helm.
ship ran aground
The audience has been waiting for the fourth series of the saga for four years, and for the first time it was shot not according to the original script, but based on Tim Powers’ novel On Stranger Tides. The plot was adapted by the same Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. The movie was supposed to give the entire series a second wind, reboot and even start over (which also explains the absence of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in the story), but it turned out to be the opposite. Stranger Tides collected the largest box office in Pirates history – more than a billion dollars, but at the same time strengthened the status of a “failed” project in the end. Or rather, drowned. Critics scolded the film for too complex, straight characters, lack of variety, and personal problems with Johnny Depp, who turned out to be not just a rebel on screen, fueling the fire. He then began dating Amber Heard, not knowing that within 10 years this relationship would turn for him into a string of lawsuits, violent accusations, and the collapse of his career.
However, the actor’s problems are not only on the personal front: no matter how carefully Disney tried to hide him, it was known from the tabloids until 2017 that he was on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. he was constantly drinking alcohol, being late to the playground, and arranging drunken fights.
However, the fifth series still came out with the writers’ promise to “return the story to the spirit of the first three,” and even some of the original cast (say hello to Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley), but without the same screenwriters. , composer, cameraman and director – the final chord in the pirate story went to Joaquim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, who were nominated for an Oscar for their Kon-Tiki adventure. Unfortunately, it did not work out, and everything was against the “Dead”: world wages, which lost more than a billion to two hundred million, and three candidates for the “Golden Raspberry”. Including “Worst Screen Ensemble” and “Worst Actor” – so promising at the beginning of the pirate series, it finally confirmed its “failed” status.
Source: People Talk
