8 Once-Popular Movie Franchises (That Will Never Work Again)

7. Jack Is Now Exactly What He Was Mocking - Pirates Of The Caribbean

To highlight just how far Johnny Depp has gone, both in terms of effort and public perception, consider this; he was nominated for Best Actor at the 76th Academy Awards for his first turn as Captain Jack Sparrow. Sure, that was the year The Lord Of The Rings swept the board, making any other movie, no matter how good, automatically an also-ran, but it reminds you just how much the first theme-park-based movie understood itself.

Captain Jack was a loose cannon, barrelling like a rolling stone through a movie that a more conventional take would have had Will and Elizabeth front-and-centre. Thanks to Depp, The Curse Of The Black Pearl was an off-kilter, safely-unsafe adventure romp that in Jack had the best type of movie hero - a well-defined, unique character who nobody expects to be the hero.

But as time wore on and Sparrow's heroism became an ever-more regular occurrence, even coming back from death itself, he lost that edge. Oh, it was trussed up as being a side-effect of his drunken antics, but by the time he was taking on Blackbeard Captain Jack was the dependable proto-hero he'd previously been eschewing. And with that all you're left with is a fantasy with Johnny Depp doing a silly voice. And there's too many of those around already.

Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth movie in the franchise, is currently in production with a 2017 release date. And given the success of On Stranger Tides, it's unlikely much effort will be made to bring the Jack everyone fell in love with back.