10 Dumb Mistakes That Ruined Once Great Franchises

Captain Jack Sparrow is the singular reason why Disney's adaptation of their theme park ride, Pirates Of The Caribbean, worked. Johnny Depp, at the height of his character-acting powers, gave a movie-dominating turn that proved so popular he got an Oscar nomination for it. That's right: Jack Sparrow is an Oscar-nominated character.

Regrettably, that success is also the key reason why Pirates gradually declined. Over the course of the later movies, the role grew and started dominating proceedings and by On Stranger Tides, he'd taken over completely, leading an expedition to the Fountain of Youth (something that wasn't powerful enough to rejuvenate the franchise). Not too surprisingly, the movies decreased in quality at a similar rate.

It's partly a result of the Hannibal complex, where taking someone interesting and overexposing them removes the mystique, but it's more how restructuring movies around a drunk, jokey scoundrel while also trying to make things increasingly booming and epic doesn't gel tonally. In making Jack the centre of the Black Pearl's adventures, rather than the enabler for the story, the series made the whole thing rather lumbering.

The box office receipts were still good (shockingly good in fact), but nobody actually seems to like the sluggish sequels. Here's hoping reintroducing Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom in Dead Men Tell No Tales can redress the balance.