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I'm gonna go in a different direction than everyone else here.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
is a big budget movie that had absolutely no business getting made, because:
Pirate movies have always been box office poison. Less than a decade earlier, Cutthroat Island made the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office bomb of all time, the latest in a series of pirate-themed failures. The only vaguely pirate-themed movies that had ever had anything you'd call success was Muppet Treasure Island and Goonies, and you could argue that Goonies wasn't really a pirate movie, it had some pirate theming in it. In 2002, Disney's Treasure Planet, basically Treasure Island IN SPAAACE had proven a box office flop. Treasure Planet is a well-written, well-made, well-advertised, well-reviewed pirate movie that failed at the box office. What idiot would bankroll another pirate film?
It was a movie based on an old ride at Disney World. It was their fourth attempt at this, they made a TV movie based on Tower of Terror in 1997 that they're apparently not proud of, 2000s Mission To Mars was a "commercial disappointment" and 2002's The Country Bears was a critical and commercial flop. Yeah the year before they made Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney made a G-rated pastiche of the Blues Brothers out of The Country Bear Jamboree. They decided to do that and nobody stopped them. No movie based on a theme park attraction had ever made its money back.
The public's reaction to the announcement was "They're making a movie based on WHAT?" This wasn't going to work. This movie had no business being made.
The film achieved massive critical and commercial success as the 141st highest grossing movie of all time taking $654.3 million against it's $140 million budget and spawning four sequels.
Everything you said was why it made so much. No one saw it coming and it was entertaining. I still think the first two are solid. After that it fell off. But the third is decent just because of Jack Sparrow's father being Keith Richards.
You can bag on all you want but it's movie. The main objective is to entertain. And it does that on many levels. It's not necessarily cinema but most of these movies are not considered high class cinema. They are blockbusters whose main objective is to make money while entertaining.
Oh I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I went to the theater to see it 8 times, with 5 different girls.
It turned out fantastic. But it had absolutely no business being made. And that was the assignment of this thread.
The first one, in terms of cinematic story telling, is actually incredibly good (I don't know how much that contributed to things); if you're interesting, this video essay points out a bunch of stuff I hadn't noticed, the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhdBNVY55oM.
Also, entirely agreed about the first two.
Ehhh…; don't get me wrong: I still absolutely love it. But I absolutely get why it flopped, too.
I loved that Tower of Terror movie. Knowing the lore made the ride so much better once I finally got to experience it.
It's apparently not available anywhere, no streaming service carries it.
Stremio carries it:
But to be fair, it's a piracy service, so it carries everything. But a damn good piracy service, though. So much so that I canceled all my streaming services and just use Stremio now.