2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Horrible Idea At The Time Because... Pirates Movies Were Considered Box Office Poison It was a sad and quiet day over at Disney when they decided that their best bet for a new successful franchise meant taking one of their oldest theme park rides and shoe-horning it into a motion picture, despite the fact that Pirate movies were neither popular, and hadn't been since the 1930s. But shame on whoever scoffed as this terrible idea during that meeting where some brave maniac stood up and shouted "I've got it! Turn the ride into a movie!," because they were actually scoffing at the idea of profiting from billions and billions of dollars.
4 billion dollars, in fact. Yes, pirates has been done before on the big screen some years earlier in Roman Polanski's awkward flop
Pirates (good name) and the appalling money-loser
Cutthroat Island, which was so bad that it ended careers. Everybody realised that - although the idea of a pirate movie seemed like it might be pretty cool in theory - nobody actually wanted to go and see one, because TV and stuff. As a movie producer, you'd naturally steer clear of a genre associated with so much loss, right? And yet this worked, mainly due to the presence of a hammy Johnny Depp (it revised his career), and pirates were suddenly cool again (for one movie. The rest suck).