USA Today are reporting that Disney have screened the May 18th opening
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides for test audiences and on the back of the positive responses (come on, they screened a POTC movie early for Joe Public... of course they will be in love with it!) to it's stand-alone narrative, plans to tell the next Jack Sparrow adventure back-to-back over the fifth and sixth installments (currently being penned by franchise regulars Terry Rossio & Ted Elliott) have been scrapped. Instead, all POTC movies from now on, like On Stranger Tides and like the old James Bond franchise, will be contained in singular, one film narratives. Producer
Jerry Bruckheimer said;
"the audience told us what they loved about it is that it was fresh, it was new, it was a whole new story... So that will carry over into the next one, too, to give it something fresh and different. As long as the audience embraces this one, we'll certainly try to make another one. It's really up to Johnny. He loves the character."
Having loved the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie but then struggled to keep up with the meandering narrative of it's two sequels, I'm certainly in favour of this decision... although I just wish they would add some stronger characters into the narrative, so the focus wouldn't totally be on
Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow from film to film. Of course it's going to be even worse in the new movie without the sub-plot of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley's romance, which wasn't particularly interesting, but at least it took the focus off Sparrow for a while. Bruckheimer went on to mention the use of 3D for the first time in the franchise;
"The technology scared us a little, only because, you saw Avatar, that was all done on sound stages. Nobody had ever taken these cameras out into the jungles and did a big adventure picture... But Rob Marshall did an enormous amount of research with the cinematographer, and we finally went to Disney and said, Look, we really think we can do this. And they thought about it for a while, because it increases the costs, but in the end, they agreed with us and said, Lets go for it.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides opens mid-may. It will make a billion dollars, that much is sure. But can it re-capture the magic of the first?