Walt Disney’s Century: Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

This year, The Walt Disney Company turns 100 years old. For good or ill, no other company has been more influential in the history of film. Walt Disney’s Century is a monthly feature in which Ken Lowe revisits the landmark entries in Disney’s filmography to reflect on what they meant for the Mouse House—and how they changed cinema. You can read all the entries here.

In 2005, Adam & Eve (the adult products—meaning sex toy—company) produced Pirates, which at a budget of about $1 million, was at the time the most expensive pornographic film ever made. It is (I’m told) one of the few that’s ever had its soundtrack released separately, and was the first adult film to receive a Blu-ray and HD DVD release. The sequel, Pirates II, was reportedly made on a budget of $8 million.

As I write here about Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, the live-action 2003 Disney movie whose title and runtime are unnecessarily long and its premise (based on the Disney World theme park ride) is unforgivably stupid, there is no more compelling evidence of its influence that I can point to than that. Sometimes, something makes so much money that it creates the film genre that will one day rule Hollywood, or fills an entire sea cave with plastic junk. Considering the sheer destructive force of that kind of success, it seems important to understand what leads to it. What was it about Johnny Depp stumbling around set slurring his words—in ways that he has claimed terrified Disney execs—that added up to Pirates of the Caribbean growing into a multi-billion-dollar franchise?

It takes a while to explain the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, or any of its sequels. It is the age of sail in the Caribbean, and the Royal Navy recovers a young shipwrecked survivor named Will Turner. He grows up to be Orlando Bloom, and gets an unsung and unappreciated job as apprentice to Port Royal’s blacksmith (he in fact actually makes all the swords while his boss sleeps off his liquor all day). The woman who saved him from the sea, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) is the daughter of the governor (Jonathan Pryce), and when she pulled him from the ocean she snatched a gold medallion from him that she has kept secret—even from him—for years. She clearly has feelings for Will, but is expected to marry an important Navy guy in a powdered wig.

Through a series of silly events, Elizabeth is saved from drowning by the off-kilter pirate Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, whose performance is the only thing anybody took away from the movie). Jack’s rap sheet is longer than The Ugly’s; he’s immediately condemned to hang. Before he can be executed, though, Port Royal is sacked by a crew of undead pirates led by Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush in B-movie mode which, for my money, is his best mode). They kidnap Elizabeth when they find her with the medallion. Will decides that the only way he can save her is with the help of the imprisoned Jack, so springs him and steals a ship to give chase.

So begins a really complicated setup: Barbossa and his crew are undead skeleton pirates who carry a gruesome curse because they plundered some lost Aztec gold. In order to undo the curse, they must:

1. Return every last piece of it. They have spent years doing this, and the piece Elizabeth nicked from Will is the very last one.
2. Spill the blood of everyone who stole the treasure onto that gold.

Point #2 is complicated by the fact that Will’s father was one of Barbossa’s crew, and that Barbossa had him dropped into the ocean earlier. Now Barbossa must spill Will’s blood in order to appease the curse (but he thinks he needs to spill Elizabeth’s, because she lied to them about being named Turner when they captured her).

It’s a lot to keep track of for a swashbuckling movie where guys with swords fight pirates who talk like the original pirate (who is from another Disney movie! Its very first live-action production!). Most of the last reel is a series of clever reversals by Jack—who grabbed a coin and is now undead and therefore functionally invincible? Whose blood needs to be spilled to wrap the curse up? Through it all, the movie has some truly gnarly effects for 2003: One sequence has the undead pirates marching across the ocean floor to carry out their sneak attack.

It was exciting, funny and… well, it was better than okay. It was a movie you went out to and had a great time seeing, then went out with your friends and probably smoked too much since indoor smoking hadn’t been banned in as many places back then. This was enough to make it the 4th-highest-grossing film that year, and launch a franchise that—like Barbossa and his scurvy crew—just. Won’t. Die.

Sometimes when a movie is a huge hit, when it spawns Happy Meals and porn parodies, people learn the wrong lessons from it. Nobody liked Curse of the Black Pearl because it was based on a theme park ride, yet Disney has tried to make Haunted Mansion movies not once but, somehow, twice. Some of them liked it because it starred Johnny Depp doing a weird bit, but you can’t, as an actor, keep doing that in every single role (especially when your weird bit is that you are a white guy playing a Native American caricature in the Year of Our Lord 2013). Jack Sparrow worked as the comic relief in the first film—the guy who functioned as a release valve for all the straight-faced melodrama going on with Will and Elizabeth. You can’t make him the inescapably Most Important Guy in the latter sequels. It’s like making Han Solo a Jedi.

The attempts to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were largely unsuccessful, but the franchise plodded on. One of my finest achievements in life was not ever seeing the second entry and then getting bodily dragged by my early-20s friend groups not once but twice to see the third film, At World’s End, a movie that is nearly three hours long and features a child being publicly executed in the first scene—again, despite the fact that it is a movie about guys with swords who dress and talk like pirates while they fight with those swords.

The franchise is an oddity, one that refuses to simply cross over into the hereafter: A sixth film has been in some form of development for the past six years, sidelined by Depp’s acrimonious personal baggage and the strikes paralyzing Hollywood, to say nothing of COVID. A reboot was rumored for a while that never materialized, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer said as recently as last year that they’re still going to make an all-women spin-off starring Margot Robbie.

It’s exhausting to sit around and ponder who Disney thinks these movies are for, and sort of bizarre to think that, just as Disney’s live-action films began with pirates in its adaptation of Treasure Island, so much of the past 20 years of their live-action offerings have in one way or another revolved around other pirate movies—a genre even more dated than the Western. Only the recent pivot to live-action adaptations of old animated films that misunderstand the originals has unseated PotC and PotC-like misfires like The Lone Ranger from their seat at the head of the live-action table at Disney.

What’s more baffling than any of it is that, in the 20 years since Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl debuted, I can’t think of a single live-action Disney film—not a movie from Lucasfilm or Marvel or any other bought-out subsidiary—that has made the kind of splash this one did. Another generation has grown up since it came out, and I worry that the next big idea we have to look forward to will be a reboot of an adaptation of a theme park ride. That would truly be a curse of undeath.

Kenneth Lowe is the best pirate hunter in the world. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.