Johnny Depp’s recent legal troubles surrounding his public breakup with Amber Heard has apparently made him persona non grata in Hollywood. Recent news has shown him being dropped from various high-profile projects like the sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and, perhaps more gutting for Depp and his career, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
The news that he will no longer reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow opens up questions about the future of the series. How will the series handle the sudden disappearance of its flagship character? Is it possible that audiences will ever get another chance to see Captain Jack Sparrow on the big screen? Most importantly, will the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise be the powerhouse series that it was without the character that put it on the map in the first place?
Just as Pirates of the Caribbean propelled Johnny Depp’s career as leading man material, Johnny Depp is the reason the franchise had any chance of surviving in the first place. He’s so pivotal that fellow actors in the films are requesting his return. This much is evident not only in critical reviews of the series’ maiden voyage, but also in the focus on Captain Jack Sparrow as the main character in the sequels that follow the original trilogy.
The character of Jack Sparrow works so well perhaps because he embodies the true rebellious spirit that people associate with genre pirates. He pays no mind to laws of either municipalities or morality, being an archetypal scoundrel while still being a sympathetic character by showing that his loyalties lie with the well-being of his friends over riches. After all, everybody loves a scoundrel with a heart of gold. The character is a lot of fun to watch because of his zany antics and the generally unstable aura of his personality. He avoids being an overly grim representation of the pirate by opting to use mischievous chicanery to get himself out of trouble rather than killing innocent people or engaging in any realistic pirate-like pillaging.
With Captain Jack Sparrow out of the picture, where does that leave the series now? There are numerous examples that easily come to mind of successful films or TV series that have replaced the main characters, but examples where such a substitution actually worked are much more difficult to list. The new lead has a fine line to walk, needing to be a new and distinct personality from the previous main character or risk of being considered derivative while still managing to retain the charm that made the original character so appealing in the first place.
Margot Robbie, whose career was launched with The Wolf of Wall Street and given added longevity with her portrayal of Harley Quinn in the DC Universe films, is currently attached to be the new lead of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The casting choice makes a lot of sense, as just as Captain Jack Sparrow was a loveable rogue whose grasp on reality was not always entirely lucid, Harley Quinn exudes a similar energy.
As an elevator pitch, “Harley Quinn but as a pirate” is intriguing. At the same time, if she plays the role of a literal pirate Harley Quinn, she risks diluting the appeal of both her new character and that of Harley Quinn. Margot Robbie has shown that she has considerable acting range and depth with her other roles, such as in the award-winning I, Tonya. In the search for someone who is going to manage the tightrope walk that taking on this role will be, she makes a solid contender.
The Pirates of the Caribbean series was arguably starting to lose steam even while Johnny Depp was playing Captain Jack Sparrow. While the films have undoubtedly been an enormous success at the box office, critical reviews of all the films after the first have garnered a “Rotten” critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The latest film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales released in 2017, has the lowest critics rating of the series with a 29%, though the audience rating has it at 61%. Still, while the second-through-fourth films all scored either above or close to $1 billion at the box office, Dead Men Tell No Tales earned $795 million. While this is still no small number and more than double the film’s budget, it shows that the series was seeing diminishing returns, and it’s possible that the sixth film would have seen an even smaller box office earning, even with Johnny Depp in the starring role again.
This means that, as far as the franchise is concerned, Margot Robbie not only needs to keep the sinking ship afloat, but she actually needs to course-correct and sail it out of troubled waters right after the series has lost its anchor. Nautical terms aside, the Pirates of the Caribbean series doesn’t have quite the allure it once did, perhaps because of waning interest in the franchise, the pirate genre, or the 5-year gap between the fourth and fifth films in the series. Johnny Depp may officially be jetsam in regards to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s possible there’s still time to save the franchise. Margot Robbie has quite the task ahead of her, but she’s shown the acumen to be able to handle it.
The Golden Age of Piracy genre is a lot of fun and there’s still plenty of stories to be told within the framework pioneered in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson with the help of N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations, inspired by the mythologized accounts of piracy written by Captain Charles Johnson in A General History of the Pyrates. Disney is currently the only studio producing big-budget productions of the genre, so if the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise dies, it may be some time before audiences get to see another swashbuckling pulp adventure. However, news of HBO Max’s new collaboration with Taiki Waititi may give the genre another classic.
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply