Will PIRATES 5 Ever Sail?

Disney announced they had directors for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (imports Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg) and that Johnny Depp was coming back and then... that's it. No more news. 

It's been a while, and at a recent Disney investor meeting it was confirmed that he film has not yet been greenlit despite having been originally scheduled for 2015. That's a big improvement over some of the past films, which barreled ahead without much by way of scripts or direction or a reason to exist. But there's still money to be found in those old pirate ships, and while Johnny Depp's star feels like it's on the wane, people will still pay to see Captain Jack Sparrow. Will the movie happen? Producer Jerry Bruckheimer thinks so.

"We're working on it, it's hopefully moving forward," he tells Bloomberg "Johnny is excited about it, obviously Disney is, we're excited about it. So hopefully we'll get that going this fall or end of the year if everything lines up properly."

Johnny's excited because he probably gets a back end deal.

But does Disney really need another Pirates? They have all this Marvel money coming in, and the last Pirates was the lowest grossing in the over a decade old series. I wonder if there's still a demand for this stuff? It doesn't look like Depp can open Transcendence at number one this weekend, and when you realize the last movie made TWO HUNDRED MILLION LESS (domestic) than the first one, despite the shitty 3D surcharge, you see a franchise that might have run aground.

So Bruckheimer has to keep saying it's coming, but do you believe him? Is there a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie in our future?

Correction: Pirates 4 actually made $64 million less than the first Pirates film. -mb