Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) Review
4/10
Jack Sparrow searches for the Fountain of Youth with a woman from his past. Six years later he’s hunted by a Spanish captain cursed into the Devil’s Triangle, alongside the son of two characters from the earlier films. The 4 is for professional filmmaking with nothing underneath it. Both are well shot, both have decent set pieces, and neither can answer the question of what its protagonist wants that he didn’t want at the end of the third film.
What makes them a case study is the arithmetic. Four hundred and ten million dollars isn’t a budget, it’s a franchise being fed, and the first three films are what the money was spent on defending. These two films bore me, and the boredom is a worse sin than a flat-out disaster would be. Everybody involved clearly knew how to make a movie, and they spent a fortune showing they had no idea why they were making these. What I remember from both is Bardem’s makeup and very little else.
Four Hundred and Ten Million Dollars
Financial statements filed in the United Kingdom show On Stranger Tides cost four hundred and ten point six million dollars between October 2009 and April 2013, offset by around thirty-two million in tax rebate. That number is the highest ever recorded for a single film, and it exists in the public record only because the production consolidated its expenses into a single UK company to claim the tax credit. Almost no other film’s real cost is visible this clearly. What did it buy. Johnny Depp’s compensation was reported at fifty-five million dollars, the production ran a hundred and six days across Hawaii, Puerto Rico, California and the United Kingdom, it shot in 3D with Avatar-derived cameras, and ten separate companies worked on the effects.
None of that appears on screen as scale. This is the shortest and smallest of the sequels, largely set in jungle and on small boats, and it looks considerably cheaper than At World’s End. That cost three hundred million. Four hundred million dollars, and what I mostly see is jungle, fog and a few small boats. That’s an absurd amount of money for fog, and At World’s End at least put its budget where I could see it.
The 3D is where a good deal of it went and it’s the element that’s aged worst. Shooting in native 3D in 2011 meant heavier rigs, slower setups and lighting for a format that darkens the image, and the film is murkier than the ones before it as a direct result of the technology it paid extra for.
Cost and visible ambition stop correlating past a certain point. Above about two hundred million, the additional money is going to talent deals, insurance, tax structuring and the overhead of scale instead of into the frame. That’s why the most expensive film ever made looks smaller than its predecessor. The predecessor had ships and armadas. This one had a star, a schedule and four countries.
For any project: ask what each increment of budget or time is buying that a reader would notice. If the answer is nothing, you’re paying for the machinery of production instead of the work.
Jack Sparrow Cannot Carry a Film
On Stranger Tides was a deliberate reset, dropping Will and Elizabeth entirely and centering the series on Sparrow. That’s the decision the whole problem grows from. Sparrow works as a supporting character and always did. In the first film he’s unpredictable, unreliable and frequently a problem for the people the story is about, and the pleasure is that nobody can tell what he’ll do. He’s a complication inside somebody else’s story.
Make him the protagonist and the complication has nothing to complicate. He has no want, no arc and no capacity to change, because his entire function is being the same regardless of circumstance. I can’t work out how anyone at the studio read this script and thought a man who can’t change could hold the story together.
Depp is also playing him louder in each film. That’s the natural direction for a performance that’s being asked to lead. By 2017 the mannerisms are the character and the danger has gone out of it entirely. Penelope Cruz supplies what he lacks. Angelica has a want, a history with him and a father to answer to, and for stretches the film works because she’s driving it. Then it remembers whose name is on the poster and hands the scene back to a man with nothing to pursue.
Dead Men Tell No Tales Tries to Fix It
The 2017 film brings back Will and Elizabeth, gives them a son, and builds a plot around breaking his father’s curse. That’s a legitimate attempt to restore the structure that worked.
It half works. Henry has a want, a deadline and somebody to save, and the film moves better than its predecessor because there’s somebody in it who needs something. What defeats it is that the new characters are duplicates. Henry is Will, Carina is Elizabeth with an astronomy degree, and the film keeps the shape of the original relationship while removing what made those specific people interesting. I kept waiting for either of them to do something Will or Elizabeth wouldn’t have done, and they never did.
Javier Bardem’s Salazar is the good element and it’s the same good element the series always has. A committed actor playing a cursed captain with a grievance, in heavy makeup, taking it entirely seriously. That role has worked four times and the films around it haven’t.
Restoring a structure isn’t the same as restoring the story. You can rebuild the arrangement of characters and still have nobody the reader has a reason to care about. A replacement character needs a want the original didn’t have. Henry wants what Will wanted, from a similar position. That makes him a function instead of a person.
The reliable element across all five films is a villain with a stated grievance and a physical curse. That’s the machine that works, and every entry rebuilt everything around it instead of building on it.
The Money Made Sense at the Time
On Stranger Tides took just over a billion dollars worldwide, the third highest grossing film of 2011. Dead Men Tell No Tales took about seven hundred and ninety-five million against two hundred and thirty. Both are profitable on their face, and Dead Men Tell No Tales has the more interesting number. A twenty-one percent drop in gross on a forty-four percent smaller budget is a studio correcting after being shown what four hundred million buys.
The comparison that clarifies it is the same summer. Transformers: Dark of the Moon cost a hundred and ninety-five million in 2011 and outgrossed On Stranger Tides, and The Dark Knight Rises the following year cost two hundred and fifty and beat it too.
So the franchise kept working and stopped being worth what it cost. That’s a slower and more common failure than a flop. Nobody had to make a disaster for the series to run out.
What Ended It
The sixth film has been in development for years without arriving, and the franchise has spent that time attached to questions about its star instead of about its stories. The series was structurally finished after the third film, which resolved its actual plot, and the two that followed were made because a property that earns a billion dollars doesn’t get retired.
That’s the machinery this page is about. Nobody at Disney made a bad decision in isolation. Each film was greenlit on the previous film’s numbers, and the numbers stayed adequate long after the reason to make them had gone. What survives is the first film, which is excellent, and four increasingly expensive attempts to work out what made it work. The answer was never Sparrow alone, and the money spent proving that would have funded twenty other films.
That’s the waste I find hardest to forgive. The first film was a delight, and these two treat it like a mine to be emptied.
There’s one more thing these two are useful for. They show what a competent studio blockbuster looks like with nothing at stake, and that’s a more common object than a disaster. Most expensive films are exactly this: professional, watchable, and forgotten again by the following Tuesday.
A series continues while the numbers hold and stops when they fail. That means the decision to continue is never about whether there’s a story left. If you’re writing a series, the useful discipline is deciding the endpoint before the commercial answer arrives. Once the first book sells, nobody involved will want to hear that there are two more in it and not five.
The danger here is a beloved supporting character. The pressure to promote one is enormous and the promotion usually destroys them, because what you loved was their relationship to a protagonist you have now removed.
Should you watch The Later Pirates Films?
Only if you’re completing the series. I give them a 4 because nobody made a disaster here, and that’s close to the problem: two handsome, expensive, competent films with no reason to exist beyond the previous film’s grosses. Both look smaller than they cost, Bardem is the only thing in either I’d watch again, and I came away more annoyed at the waste than at anything on screen.
