Lord knows how you go from directing the Oscar winning
Chicago,
Memoirs of a Geisha, and the bound to be nominated for something
Daniel Day-Lewis musical
Nine - all the way to the overblown, overhyped, and over staying it's welcome
Pirates of the Caribbean franchise but that seems to be the state of play regarding the fourth movie in the series right now.
Variety say director
Rob Marshall is ready to steer the billion dollar ship after series director
Gore Verbinski jumped to Universal's adaptation of the video game
Bioshock earlier this year and never attempted to come back on board when that vessel sunk. My question is who approached who? Did Marshall go to Disney or did Disney go to Marshall, because the answer to that question might just be significant. I'll explain... If Disney went to Marshall with the offer for
POTC 4, then they were basically turned down by a handful of other names (I always thought
National Treasure's Jon Turteltaub, currently in post on
The Scorcerer's Apprentice would have been an easy hiring) or they clearly had no idea of who to replace Verbinski with. If Marshall went to them, then my hope is he is a fan of the pirate genre and the only way to get one of these movies made these days with a confident studio backing is to have Captain Jack Sparrow as your main character. He would find it difficult to get a big budget for a pirate movie anywhere else, so this may have been Marshall's only ever opportunity to make a swashbuckler, so that's what I'm clinging onto. Marshall's a decent enough director and actually a better talent than what I would have expected they would have attracted for this, he's just something of an odd fit for a
Jerry Bruckheimer movie. And how will this affect his Oscar chances with
Nine, because you can't imagine that the Academy would like to see the Best Picture statue go to a guy who would by then be gearing up to work on a blockbuster Pirate movie at Disney. As we heard last week,
this one looks to film next spring as potentially the first of a new trilogy with
Johnny Depp and
Geoffrey Rush (Captain Barbosa) as the two main leads. No returns for
Orlando Bloom or
Keira Knightley, at least not in the first movie.