10 Movie Villains Totally Ruined In The Sequels
10. Captain Barbossa - Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
The Original
The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie is jam-packed with colourful characters, but right next to Johnny Depp's lovable rogue Jack Sparrow, we have the villainous Captain Barbossa, played with deliciously slimy vigour by the inimitable Geoffrey Rush.
If the sheer awesome look of the character and Rush's animated performance aren't enough, Barbossa remains the most interesting antagonist the series has ever seen.
Cursed to turn into an undead pirate every night, Barbossa's motivations are easily understood - to re-acquire a missing piece of Aztec gold and break the curse - yet he remains cunning and hard-edged enough that he never quite earns the audience's sympathy.
The Sequel
Due to the popularity of the character, Barbossa ended up appearing in all four subsequent sequels, albeit in an increasingly diminished and less-satisfying capacity.
After getting a surprise resurrection at the end of the second film, Dead Man's Chest, Barbossa's allegiance gradually shifts towards the heroic side, with him becoming a privateer for the British Navy in the fourth movie, On Stranger Tides.
The franchise makes a contrived attempt to downplay Barbossa's previous villainy by introducing increasingly more dastardly antagonists in later sequels, while the most recent film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, reveals that Barbossa has a secret daughter.
And of course, she just so happens to be the movie's female lead, Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario), which inevitably leads to Barbossa sacrificing himself to save her life, prompting her to take up his last name in his honour.
As entertaining as Barbossa was, his gravitation towards heroism never really felt earned, and the contrived addition of a daughter was nothing more than a ham-handed attempt to win over the remaining doubters before he was killed off, possibly for good this time.
It's a far cry from his status as a delightful trickster in the earlier movies, and indicative of just how creatively ill-wrought most of the sequels truly have been.