According to Deadline, the writing team behind Deadpool, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, are in talks with Disney to reboot the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise… just one year after the release of what we naively thought might be the last film in the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
(BTW, it’s okay if you didn’t know that movie existed – no one did.)
Reese and Wernick previously wrote both Deadpool films together, as well as 2009‘s Zombieland.
The first Pirates movie only came out in 2003. That’s 15 years ago. And I feel it bears repeating: the fifth movie came out last year. I feel like you need a little more time in between movies for it to count as a ‘reboot’.
Critics reckon this might be Disney’s attempt at continuing the franchise without Johnny Depp, given the allegations made against him by ex-wife Amber Heard. Given Disney fired James Gunn for posting unsavoury tweets, it follows that they’d try and get out of further engagements with Depp, too. It’s too early to know who’s involved though, beyond producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and Reese and Wernick.
Regardless of the reason, the Pirates franchise stopped being interesting a long time ago. I don’t think the solution is to give control to two guys who, in the words of The AV Club, will probably make the characters “even more quippy, irritating, and fourth wall-averse than they already were”.
Audiences are just generally tired of the series at this point; the fifth film was the second-lowest grossing Pirates film in the series. Has it occurred to anyone in Hollywood that movies about pirates can be made without the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ name attached? Surely it can be done. This is just Disney being lazy, just like their live-action reboots of cartoon classics are lazy.
In short: nobody asked for this, nobody wants this, Disney can keep it.
