10 Movie Franchises That Just Kept Getting Worse

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was a breath of fresh air for blockbuster cinema when it swashbuckled into theaters back in 2003; defiantly old-school, massively entertaining and creating a cultural icon in Captain Jack Sparrow, it speaks volumes about the movie's success that in an industry as cannibalistic as Hollywood, nobody else even tried to make a pirate movie.

Gore Verbinski's back-to-back sequels, while admirable for their epic action sequences and often outright weirdness, became bogged down with needlessly complex plotting and almost impenetrable mythology that took the shine of the franchise, before soft reboot On Stranger Tides made the fatal mistake of positing Captain Jack as the central character when he works much better in smaller doses.

This year's Dead Men Tell No Tales is both the worst-reviewed entry in the series yet and the lowest-grossing since the original fourteen years ago, with Jack Sparrow in real danger of wearing out his welcome with audiences after four underwhelming sequels in a row. However, with almost $4.5bn in earnings so far it still seems unlikely that Disney will let such a lucrative cash-cow go to waste.