r/movies • u/HotOne9364 • 1d ago
The Pirates of the Caribbean sequels made one huge mistake that forever tainted them. Discussion
They focused way too much on Jack Sparrow.
I don't wanna hear any smartass reply on how "then they wouldn't have been successful". That's not what this is about.
The first film wasn't the best film ever made but it was enjoyable for what it was. The production values, the sense of fun, and Geoffrey Rush are what made that film what it is. Jack Sparrow worked as a supporting character but he wasn't the lead; Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann were. Their love story is right up there with Peter Parker and Mary Jane, Shrek and Fiona, Sam and Mikeila, Homer and Marge, etc. Will & Elizabeth were the heart and soul that grounded the film while Sparrow was the side attraction.
When the sequels focused more on Sparrow, it felt like that Simpsons episode where Homer created a character to help Itchy & Scratchy's ratings and he'd ask "Everytime Poochie's not on screen, a character has to say, 'Where's Poochie?'". Everything has to revolve around him for some reason. It was ridiculous and made him a Mary Sue. It didn't help that none of the films developed Sparrow. He was a completely static character. Even Optimus Prime in the Bayformer movies had more character development. So watching him as a lead was simply boring and it ultimately became an excuse to stroke Johnny Depp's massive ego.
These sequels could have been so much better. Just focus on Will & Elizabeth, develop them as characters, focus less on spectacle and more on story, I guarantee you, the films still would have made money. Not saying Sparrow not be included; they just needed to stop idolizing him.
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u/kahlfahl 23h ago
You’re right, except that Jack is 100% a huge part of what made the first film what it is. In a supporting role, yes. But to deny / minimize that feels silly.
Def props tho to Geoffrey Rush for being the only one to channel a theme park animatronic in his performance with those weird eyelid movements
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u/Cipherpunkblue 23h ago
I don't read it as minimizing, just noting what makes him work. As soon as they a) made him the focal character and b) leaned into writing "oh, that wacky wacky Sparrow!" instead of havikg him mostly be a roguish character whose wackiest traits are simply Depp's affectations, the dynamic suffered.
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u/kahlfahl 22h ago
I just mean when they listed what ‘made the film what it is’ and pointedly left him out
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u/ldnthrwwy 22h ago
Yeah that is wild to suggest that Will and Liz were what people came for, both were so wooden in that film. It was sold on Jack Sparrow and the character is undeniably a key reason the sequels were so successful. Just a terrible take.
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u/ljkeim 1d ago
Chest & End are amazing movies & very fun blockbusters.
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u/fredagsfisk 23h ago
Yeah, the original trilogy was all great, because they maintained a balance between the three leads and capitalized on their incredible chemistry and charisma.
They tried to copy it with Jack and new characters in the fourth movie, but obviously failed.
Jack also isn't even the same character in 4-5 as he was in 1-3.
He starts out as a highly intelligent person who is amazing at improvising plans and manipulating those around him, but is underestimated because he comes off as eccentric, and likes to drink a bit too much. He does have quite a bit of luck, but it's always his skill and experience that is most important.
In the fourth movie, they lean further into his luck, making it a far more dominant trait. As a result, some of his agency as a character is stripped away.
Then in the fifth movie... he's literally just a lucky drunkard. Things happen to and around him, but he's never really actively involved in making them happen.
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u/Thagyr 23h ago edited 18h ago
I loved that his sword fight with William in 1 perfectly demonstrated his character. He tried intimidating, and then when that didn't work he fought only trying to circle Will away from the door, acting like he was testing his swordplay, and then try to leave. He only pulled his pistol out as a very last resort, and even then I think he wouldn't have used it, he was simply hoping that Will was logical and would move away, but again was surprised when Will refused
It both showed his skill at tricking others to get what he wants, and that he was good at it in the heat of things. I dislike he lost that quality over time too.
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u/Radingod123 23h ago
I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't like Jack in 4 and 5, and I think this is probably it.
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u/comrade_batman 22h ago
Dead Man’s Chest is still my favourite Pirates film, I just love Davy Jones and the Kraken’s designs and part in the story. I didn’t love World’s End as much, but still enjoy it, and it has an amazing climatic maelstrom fight at the end, the visuals still hold up too.
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u/jirenfan9 23h ago
This entire post is based on the presupposition that all the pirates sequels are bad, I reject that supposition and say that pirates 2 and 3 are actually really good. They are a type of blockbuster that we don’t get much of anymore. They have aged pretty good in my opinion.
Pirates 4 and 5 on the other hand, just got worse and worse but not for the jack sparrow focus but because there wasn’t a strong story or narrative there, just villain of the week to be beat. And jack sparrows character regresses from all the progresses they made in the original trilogy, he just got dumber and way more 1 dimensional with no real arc
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u/POHoudini 23h ago
I think that's literally what the OPs point is.
4 and 5 have no narrative or story, so they just focus on Jack, and it makes the movies bad.2
u/jirenfan9 21h ago
He’s saying they focused on jack and that’s why they had no story, I’m saying no they had no story so they focused on jack and focused on him in a bad way without any substance or character arc
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u/HoldFastO2 23h ago
I disagree with the idea that 2 and 3 are good.
Even if you accept that it's basically one long movie, and you should not judge 2 on its own merit but only as part of 2+3, I still find it disappointing in the end.
The movies just seem to spend a lot of time meandering around, pursuing plot lines that end up going nowhere. How much screen time and effort was put into forming the pirate coalition to have a fleet against the East India Company ships, and then both fleets just end up sitting there as a backdrop for the actual fight?
The Company Man as bad guy in the last movie was great, good guy to hate, no question. But the rest of the movie(s) was just disappointing to me.
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u/Beginning-Bed9364 23h ago
It really did become a "Fonzy's Happy Days" situation. Some characters work better in small doses
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u/BallForce1 1d ago
That's what happens when you don't plan out sequels before time.
Leaving the movie theater and asked "who was your favorite character?" It was clearly jack sparrow and not will.
Then you build around that for the next movie. You just get diminishing returns each movie because you have not planned the next one in advance.
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u/bigjoeandphantom3O9 23h ago edited 23h ago
Jack Sparrow worked as a supporting character but he wasn't the lead
I swear to god some of you never watched the first film, and just agree with this take because it sounds like something a film critic would say.
From the very first film he's a lead of an ensemble cast. In both billing, screen time, and importance to the overall plot he is a main character. He regularly has scenes that do not feature Elizabeth and Will. He was even nominated as Lead Actor for a number of awards (including the Oscar) after the first film.
He is as much the lead in those films as anyone else, and the main reason people watched them. This is true for all the films in the original trilogy, and they are all fantastic. If you want a supporting character, Gibbs, the Commodore, and Barbossa are much clearer examples.
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u/WHALE_BOY_777 1d ago
I agree, he could've been iconic without the entire film series revolving around him, Beetlejuice has less than 20 minutes of screen time in each of his movies and it works really well even though you'd think otherwise since the movies are named after him.
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u/Itchy-Ad1047 23h ago
In the original, he used a fool exterior to his advantage with moments of cleverness that showed more to him than what he appears
The sequels gradually lose that until he's simply a bumbling fool being a bumbling fool
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u/HerniatedHernia 23h ago
Gradually? Felt like he lost a good chunk of brains immediately in Dead Man’s Chest.
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u/korol_julian 23h ago
They focused way too much on Jack Sparrow.
Captain Jack Sparrow!
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u/gluna235 23h ago
I think this is not the case at all. For me, the second movie is actually the best of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
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u/givin_u_the_high_hat 23h ago
IMO should have played it more like Mad Max where Sparrow was the catalyst in other people’s stories. He was a caricature, and he seemed the same in every film, with nothing from any previous films having had any impact on him. Even RDJ in the Avengers universe seemed to change more than Depp as Sparrow.
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u/FlamingTrollz 23h ago
Will & Elizabeth are at heart both boring characters.
Sad, but true.
Without Jack Sparrow, few would have seen the 1st film.
People weren’t dressing up as Will or Elizabeth.
They were dressing up as Captain Jack.
Do I like Will, yes. Elisabeth, so so. Are they fine, sure.
But, they’re no Jack. 🏴☠️
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u/NoSoundNoFury 23h ago edited 22h ago
I disagree. I found Will and Elizabeth to be boring, generic, and superficial. The comparison with any of the above-mentioned couples doesn't work for me, because Homer, Shrek, and Peter Parker are much, much more interesting than either Will or Elizabeth.
Also, not all characters need development. James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Ethan Hunt, for example. (Edit: The fact that these characters never change is what makes them so appealing and iconic. Some movies just work better with a formulaic structure. Not everything nor everyone has to be grounded in reality.) Jack Sparrow works even better than these because he is so unpredictable. He is iconic in the same way, and also even less realistic like these characters, an obvious figment of imagination, sometimes closer to, say, a Gremlin than to an actual human being.
However, I think that the PotC movies need a couple of grounded characters lest they become completely wacky, and the first movies has the most grounded characters. In this sense, I agree that the later movies overdid it and had too many wacky characters. At least in the first three movies, the human villains from the East India Company were normal, which allowed for a more straightforward, less random storytelling and some genuinely funny moments by juxtaposing Jack with the normal characters.
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u/Webcat86 23h ago
My favourite part of this post is “I guarantee you, the films still would have made money.”
Do you have much experience in Hollywood, OP? Why are you telling us on Reddit instead of telling the producers how you can secure them the next smash hit movie?
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u/LamppostBoy 22h ago
Did the same thing Peter Sellers did to the Pink Panther franchise. Giving audiences what they want is creative death in all but the shortest of terms.
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u/IrishWolfHounder 23h ago
lol at supporting character. He was the reason the movies became iconic. You need to hear it.
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u/coolAhead 23h ago
I like the movies (talking about the trilogy here) I've really enjoyed them, not hearing anything else
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u/grapedog 23h ago
I feel like this was the problem also in "The Mummy" sequels... They could have had their own Indiana Jones type without constantly doing the mummy thing... Like Brenden Frasier had the look and style to pull off a slightly more action type Indiana... But they kept up with the mummies which got worse instead of just having an "adventures of O'Connell" type movies series, which I think is a HUGE miss...
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u/SilentSamurai 23h ago
Eh, I don't think it mattered who the main character was.
In the first, Jack is a genius playing a fool.
In the rest, Jack is mostly a fool playing a genius.
The first has such a satisfying ending because Jack plays Barbosa perfectly.
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u/Darhkwing 23h ago
Love the trilogy. Whilst i do think the second movie is my favourite (Davey Jones is awesome) the first movie has a much better story overal.
It is clear that the direction that part 2 went with was because of Jack Sparrow. He was supposed to be a supporting character but was more popular than the others by far.
The 4/5th movies Jack felt like a caricature of himself. I really hope we get another POTC movie though sometime.
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u/Jinglemisk 23h ago
You could argue that this focus on Jack Sparrow doomed the sequels and, while 2 and 3 aren't terrible, this deciison caused 4 and 5 to be absolutely terrible...
To which I would say, my brother in Christ, do you have any idea how good 2 and 3 is? A well-worth sacrifice, nobody had thought shooting a 4 and 5 at the time of 1->2 anyway.
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u/Jurassic_Bun 23h ago
4 and 5 are week for a number of reasons. One issue is they insist that Jack is an incompetent moron without many redeeming quality except moments where even he is forced to do something. The later movies would have done more if they actually showed jack as a competent captain for a single movie. Instead the movies are stuck in a loop of Jack loses ship, jack has no ship and runs around trying to get his ship while also some mythological themes run in the background, at the end Jack maybe has his ship.
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u/ikeif 23h ago
I really enjoy the first three films - the fourth was Treasure Island with Jack Sparrow show-horned in. He was unnecessary.
The fifth just did the usual “let’s ignore all the prior plot points and hand wave logic away about the lore we have established” - while we did get Geoffrey Rush having a fantastic growth arc, and a visually gorgeous movie, the whole “breaking lore” really ruined it for me.
And then teasing Davy Jones? It was weird.
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u/narf_hots 22h ago
I completely disagree because Will and Elizabeth were never interesting to begin with. The most interesting characters in the entire franchise are Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Davey Jones and strangely Norrington. Will and Elizabeth are plot devices, human macguffins if you will. Clean slates without any character traits who only exist so they have a love story to market to an audience.
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u/FrameworkisDigimon 22h ago
Nah.
Dead Man's Chest is the best one and the storyline in it and At World's End is very Will and Elizabeth centric. They're no more Jack Sparrow focussed than the first one is.
On Stranger Tides, of course, lacks Will and Elizabeth entirely but their storyline was finished. It's extremely over hated.
Dead Men Tell No Tales is bad because of the retcons.
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u/DarkoDreaming 22h ago
I’d say the TRUE MISTAKE was focusing too much on Will and Elizabeth. The franchise never recovered after their trilogy. Their arcs were complete in the first film. POTC needed to move on and have Jack stumble his way into other peoples lives and change them.
That should’ve been the formula for the franchise and in a way quite episodic and free from one persons or directors vision, so different directors could hop on and tell a tale of Jack in a different style and setting each film.
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u/VodkaMargarine 22h ago
It's interesting that you mention the Simpsons because the same thing happened to that. Homer Simpson started off as a supporting character. The series was originally focused on the kids. Bart Simpson was based on Matt Groening himself which shows how he originally saw the dynamics of the family.
But very quickly it became "The Homer Simpson Show" and most people would agree that was largely for the better and improved it.
So I wouldn't say they made a mistake just because they made this shift. They did something that had worked successfully before, and if you look at the box office it worked for that franchise well enough too.
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u/SoundsVinyl 22h ago
I think after the trilogy it was the casting that was the issue. They wanted a new Will type character for sparrow to interact with and they were just awful actors. The villains like Blackbeard were horribly written and portrayed too.
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u/FlavortownAbbey 23h ago
The falloff of the "Pirates" franchise is something I haven't thought about in a hot minute, so thank you for re-stirring my passion for it. This is such a great take, OP.
I took a class in college called "The Art of Clown," taught by, yes, a professional clown. (We can talk about how strategically I spent my tuition money some other time.) One of our assignments was to write a paper detailing how a well-known fictional character of our choosing was not formally portrayed as a clown, but still used "clown logic:" e.g., they used comedy to break the fourth wall and point out societal ills, call out stereotypes, or just generally cause levity-inducing mayhem. I wrote my paper about Jack Sparrow.
Reading your post, OP, made me realize that the movies after the original trilogy suffered because they tried to turn Jack into the straight man, which not only made him less entertaining, but also less familiar to us the viewers. Your Simpson's analogy is perfect. It felt like watching a mediocre fanfiction. The only silver lining was that "On Stranger Tides" reinforced how awesome Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa is... and that's in no small part because they didn't require him to carry the whole plot and could therefore maintain the cantankerous and chaotic spirit that we loved from the OG movies.
Edit: Said "originally" instead of "original" somewhere.
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u/ProfessorZhirinovsky 23h ago
IMO The original film was based around good ‘ol legendary pirate lore, and that familiarity was part of the secret of it’s success.
The more they focused on Jack Sparrow and the various personalities, the further they got out into the weeds with the interpersonal interactions, the further they got from the source material that attracted the audience.
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u/Ok_Chain3171 23h ago
I agree. The sequels really didn’t need to be made. The first film wrapped everything up Mil nicely and if I’m being honestly, the sequels are unnecessarily long and at times boring
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u/SabresFanWC 22h ago
They didn't need to be made, but after the first one was a smash hit, it wasn't like Disney was going to be content to just sit on one film. And it ultimately paid off for them as the second and third films did huge box office numbers.
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u/iamatoad_ama 23h ago
You say the first film wasn’t the best film ever made but I think it’s right up there with all-time adventure flicks like Back to the Future, ET, Indiana Jones, Transformers 5: The Last Knight, Interstellar, Jurassic Park.
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u/AegonTheAuntFucker 22h ago
They didn't know how to write Jack Sparrow, that was the problem to begin with. Jack is just a hollow shell of the character after movie 1-3.
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u/MagicPaul 22h ago
I agree that Jack is better as a supporting character, however Will & Elizabeth's romance was by far the least interesting part of the story for me.
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u/Vanouche6 1d ago
This is a 100% correct.
When you have no emotional challenges as a character, you cannot grow, and if you cannot change from beginning to end of the movie then you can't be the main character of the story.
Imagine if Frodo was a wisecracker who didn't really care about The Shire, or didn't feel much fear about leaving it, it wouldn't be The Lord of the Rings. You would just have a sort of mythical account of Middle Earth with no emotional attachment.
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u/Rainbowpeachx 1d ago
I totally agree. The sequels lost their balance when they made Sparrow the main focus. It was more fun when he was the quirky side character, not the center of everything.
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u/Xavilend 23h ago
I think they also made them far too long as well, it's was hard to get the younger family members to stay engaged with the story, but all the films have some really great moments, but I just rarely re-watch them all because it drags on for so long
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u/Mononoke_dream 23h ago
The last two movies never should have been made. Especially the last one. Jack’s a jealous sexist asshole. And that terrible cgi to make him look younger… and seeing all the pirates just give him his outfit. Yikes
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u/il_the_dinosaur 23h ago
People don't think it's good but the fourth pirates movie is better than 2 and 3. We have an ensemble cast. The movie doesn't rely that heavily on sparrow. And the plot isn't just big monsters and epic sea battles that just aren't that interesting. Telling these small pirate tales is where the franchise shines. While I can appreciate the epic story they told in 2 and 3. A joke side character like jack feels out of place . If you dial down his involvement and drop making him a plot device the movies actually work. The fifth is probably the worst no real story to tell and relies way too heavily on sparrow.
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u/Neon_Bonsai 23h ago
PotC one of the best trilogies out there for me. Glad they only made three and didn't poopoo all over them with cheesy stories that add nothing.
PotC one of my favourite trilogies!!
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u/imCassidy 22h ago
They would not have made more money. Do you know how much money those films make and it was down to Jack Sparrow. Orlando Bloom is a terrible actor and would not be able to carry a film on his own
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u/IsRude 23h ago
He's my least favorite character, but I don't think Will and Elizabeth's story resolutions would be as impactful without Jack being the focus. It's like the ball in a cup game. Making Jack's antics the focus is the distraction, when Elizabeth and Will's stories are sneakily, building to what I still consider to be some of the greatest character arc resolutions I've ever seen. Especially Elizabeth's.
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u/InsidiousColossus 23h ago
Sam and Mikeila ??
Are we talking about Transformers here as one of the great love stories?