GO TO: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (2003) dir. Gore Verbinski

Earlier this summer, Deadpool & Wolverine came out and featured some of the clumsiest and most consumerist– yet still enormous– compositions ever realized, and not a minute of the film went by without ad-lib nonsense spewing from Ryan Reynolds’s lips. Deadpool & Wolverine exemplifies most of what has gone wrong with big-budget filmmaking. It’s an ugly brand advertisement overflowing with abrasive, crude humor. The individuality of actual artists effaced by corporate goulash and accountant excretion. Or, to word things another way, we took the Pirates of the Caribbean for granted and now we live with the consequences of our actions.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was an improbable film. Before the franchise, Hollywood executives viewed piracy (of both kinds, I suppose) as a bane and not a boon to the adventure genre. Most pirate films up until 2003 were box-office stinkers. 1995’s Cutthroat Island easily ranks as one of the biggest financial disasters in film history, and for the majority of a decade its damage kept pirates away from the multiplex. A handful of Disney executives wouldn’t let their fever dream of adapting a movie based on their Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park ride die, and thank the gods of the silver screen for these strident believers.

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