In Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, you enter a small, smelly boat and float past animatronic pirates getting drunk and clanging foam swords together. There’s a brief hologram of Bill Nighy’s fearsome Davey Jones, and then you circle back out into the sunlight to buy a $9 iced lemonade.
Just how did Disney wrangle a five-film, blockbusting adventure franchise out of such a charmingly hokey experience? If you need a reminder, head to Disney+ to check out every film in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
Introducing us to Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards-inspired, loutish pirate Captain Jack, The Curse of the Black Pearl was a box-office phenomenon, with Geoffrey Rush’s dastardly Barbossa facing off against loved-up landlubbers Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley).
The trio reunited to battle Davey Jones in Dead Man’s Chest, which got weaker reviews but still raked in plenty of doubloons for the House of Mouse. At World’s End was filmed back-to-back with the second film by the Curse of the Black Pearl director Gore Verbinski, enjoying an ever-bigger budget and spectacle but still middling reviews.
Bloom and Knightley didn’t make it aboard for 2011’s On Stranger Tides, the first film in the series not directed by Verbinski. The franchise’s Rotten Tomatoes rating kept dipping, and yet fans would still faithfully show up for Depp, who was clearly the heart of the films as the excited faces in the video above suggest.
Depp’s sneaky cameo in the amusement park ride was to promote the franchise’s most recent entry, Dead Men Tell No Tales, where Javier Bardem’s crusty villain menaced the Cap and a new pair of young lovers. But it seems his voyage with Disney might end there.
Regardless of whether future Pirates of the Caribbean films are on the horizon, Depp’s involvement was shut down after a question from Amber Heard’s defense lawyer during Depp and Heard’s volatile defamation trial: “If Disney came to you with $300 million and a million alpacas, nothing on this earth would get you to go back and work with Disney on a Pirates of the Caribbean film?” The actor responded: “that is true”.
